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The Obligatory World Cup Post.

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File:Qatar Airways (FIFA World Cup 2022 Livery).jpg - Wikimedia Commons

If you’re looking forward to enjoying the World Cup (2 weeks to go) then you’re probably a football fan or  have Brazil, Spain, England (yep, I said it) or France in the staff sweep-stake. If you’re not enjoying the World Cup then chances are you’re not a fan of football, or the staff sweep-stake left you with Morocco or Qatar.

The World Cup does lend itself to a variety of activities to revise material you have likely covered this year…

Recapping clothes and colours

This is one of my favourite ways to teach adjective endings. Football kits lend themselves to this task as the link explains. This could also be achieved with the flags of the countries.

Developing opinions and reasons

crystal-ball-14785249855CZ

CCO Public Domain

Why not get each member of your class to write a prediction? You could even involve yourself in this, particularly if you’re still bitter about the sweep-stake.

I think that <insert country here> is going to win

I believe that <team that is not England> is going to win

In my opinion <probably Spain> is going to win

You could change this depending on the ability of the students. Students could add a reason for their opinion “because they have better players”.  You could use the “will” future in French and Spanish instead of going to. They could add superlatives “because Ronaldo is the best”. More advanced students could use a subjunctive: “I hope that”.  There is an opportunity to revise descriptions and opinions “I like … because he/she is talented.”  You could also teach some colloquial language.

Never ending debate

The opinions above can be turned into a never-ending debate (at least that’s the name I’m giving it for now).  This is based on something I hazily recall from a video I saw by Greg Horton a number of years ago where students did something similar with school subjects (apologies to Greg if I have in anyway misrepresented what was going on in the video- happy to amend if needed). It requires some structuring from the teacher.  Your slide/lesson resources will require the following:

  1. A sentence builder with opinions similar to the ones above about who is going to win.
  2. Some questions such as “do you think … have a chance?”
  3. Some positive, negative, neutral opinions in your sentence builder.
  4. Some colloquial phrases “no way”, “not in a million years”

Put students into 3s or 4s. 

Student A (to student B): Who do you think will win?

Student B: “I think … is going to win because…”  “What do you think student C?”

Student C: “No way!  I think … is going to win because”

Student A: “not in a million years, … is going to win because”

There are 36 teams in the world cup, you should be fine to keep going for a while!

Ways I have found to make this more effective is to do the following:

  1. Firstly, this one only works first time!  Secondly, choose well.  Get one student from each group and tell them that if the group is still talking French/German/Spanish after 2mins to silently raise their hand.  You reward any groups with hands raised.
  2. Tell students you are walking around and will reward anyone speaking really good French/Spanish/German.  Write the names silently on a whiteboard and tell them afterwards.  It’s a handy reminder to the rest that had they been doing it too, they would have had the reward.
  3. Tell one student in the group to be deliberately controversial.  “Yes Morocco are going to win the world cup because…”
  4. Gradually remove/disappear parts of the sentence builder.
  5. Put a timer on the screen.  If students are still talking in TL when timer hits zero then there is a reward.

How are you going to watch the final – future tense revision.

Students produce their plans for the day of the final. There is an opportunity here for a short piece of writing involving time phrases, opinions, reasons and the future tense. If they are not planning to watch it at all then it is still good future tense practice.  This is a great opportunity to teach some more complex structures such as “after having done…” or “before watching…”

Consequences Activity

Students write their name at the bottom of a piece of paper. They write a sentence at the top, fold it towards themselves and pass it on. They keep going until all the sentences have been written. It can produce something amusing. Watch the kids closely (you know the ones I mean).

In the morning I’m going to…

For lunch, I’m going to…

In the afternoon, I’m going to

For dinner, I’m going to..

After having eaten, I’m going to…

… and … are going to be in the final.

Phonics Practice

Image result for seleccion de peru

This is one I have used a number of times. I always wonder why students can pronounce any footballer but then get every other word with the same sound patterns wrong!

For Spanish teams, pick one of the South American sides. Far harder. Most of the Spanish team will be well known to your kids whereas Costa Rica or Honduras’ first elevens will not be well known.

Recap target sounds with students. For Spanish this may be G, J, CE, CI, LL among others. For French this might be silent endings or other sounds. For Germany this could be sounds with umlauts, “ch” endings or double vowels.

Option 1: students announce the team to their partner as if they were on TV reading out the lineup.

Option 2: students race through the team trying to beat their partner to the end.

Option 3: teacher goes through lineup and students have to spot the mistakes made and correct them.  You could do this as a Conti style “faulty echo”.  With faulty echo I tend to have students write “la primera” and “la segunda” on each side of a whiteboard.  They show me after hearing both versions of the word and keep a points count going on their board.

Song Activities

I think England could have stopped at that John Barnes rap or Footballs Coming Home

Sergio Ramos was involved in this beauty…

How to exploit it…?

Well, I had some ideas but then found this superb guide on Frenchteacher.net Anything I write would simply be repeating the list.

Or use their Euro 2016 effort…

If you are a bit sick of the football, or your class is, then do the same with the song “Así Soy” It worked wonders with my Year 10 class.

Comparatives/Superlatives Revision

Image result for greater than

The world cup is an opportunity to revise comparatives and superlatives. Who is better, worse, faster, slower, uglier, less talented, more talented? Who is the best, worst, most irritating? There is a TES worksheet from a previous tournament that just needs a little bit of updating, based on who didn’t make it this year.

Player Biography / Description

Image result for david de gea spain save

Mira 3 has a section on biographies of famous people.  Viva 2 does a similar page on musicians. Why not do the same with footballers. There is an opportunity here to practise the past tense with “he played for”, “he signed for”, “he was born in”. There is an opportunity for the present tense “she plays for”, “she is a defender”. I’m sure you can come up with even more ideas.

Georgia Stanway completes move from Manchester City to Bayern Munich | The Mail

Whilst this post is predominantly about the World Cup, England quarter final hero and goalscorer Georgia Stanway has just joined Bayern Munich.  A quick proofreading of this post shows that there has been a lot of French/Spanish emphasis so far so this is for the German teachers.

  • You could put together a reading text covering past career, present situation and future hopes.
  • You could use this text from FCBFrauen with an emphasis on cognates.
  • You could use it as a listening text.  There is a “Text Vorlesen” option.  It is a little stilted.  Whilst I would normally advocate slowing listening texts with beginners, I’m not sure you would want to in this case.

Read some tweets

Image result for twitter

The vast majority of international teams are on Twitter, as are their players. You could screenshot a few and use them as a translation task. Example below:

Listening Bingo

Image result for barry davis commentator

Give students a selection of football related terms. You could record yourself commentating over a video clip, you could mute the clip and improvise on the spot, or use the original commentary (with advanced level)

Option 1: students select 5 terms and you play bingo. First person to hear all 5 wins.

Option 2: students have a list and tick off as many as they hear. People who get the correct number win.

Developing Target Language Teaching II

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There are many superb teachers of languages out there and if you are teaching your lessons perfectly in the target language then this post really is not for you. I wrote about this first in Developing Target Language Teaching however it has been an ongoing journey of improvement since.  In 10 years, I’ve had to teach 3 different languages and am at varying levels with each.  In a previous school, this meant all three in the same day on most days and hourly switching. If you are less confident with a language then this post is for you. If you are following NCELP schemes of work or similar then this is for you. If your department is more EPI influenced then a substantial amount of your target language input is probably coming from the LAM (listening as modelling) activities in the modelling, awareness-raising and receptive practice phases, however there may be something for you to take from it.

Routines

In my previous post, I wrote about how scripting was helpful. Lockdowns really helped with this. I began each lesson with the exact same language and it has stuck since. In my department, we moved from using command forms to “we’re going to”. This was partly due to the higher surrender value of “we’re going to” and it has worked a treat as students know a higher proportion of infinitives and are familiar with read/write/translate/speak etc. It also saves working out command forms in a variety of languages where they don’t come as naturally.

How do you start/finish a lesson?

It is well worth considering what are the first and last things that your classes hear from you? Is it target language? Is it comprehensible target language? Do you vary what you say depending on the level of the group?

Working it out Step by Step. This is how I set up a …

If you are teaching a language in which you are not particularly strong then it is a worthwhile use of a PPA to sit down and script out how you would set up a speaking / listening / reading / writing / translation task in that language and then check it by a more confident colleague. For example, let’s take a listening task. I’ll put the script in English below with “stage directions” in brackets.

  • We are going to listen (check understanding of listen, use gestures)
  • In your books, the information that you write is numbers / letters / positive / negative (check understanding, use gestures)
  • We are going to listen two times (gesture, make sure fingers correct way round, check understanding)
  • If it is dificult, possibly third time (gesture, check understanding).
  • Number 1 (let it play as per recording)
  • We are going to check
  • Number 1 = A
  • Who has number 1 correct? Hand up (gestures).
  • We are going to continue with 2,3,4,5 etc.
  • Afterwards we are going to correct it.

Get pupils to translate as you go.

My one caveat with setting up activities is that certain things are best done in English. I would argue these are (but not limited to):

  • Some games with high value (no snakes no ladders) are sometimes best explained in English the first time as ultimately the game is forcing the students to produce the language and you might arive at that quicker.
  • Grammar explanations.  I find these are best done in English however practice activities after can normally be explained in TL.
  • Negative discipline with consequences.  Best done in English so complete clarity exists.

Icons

Doug Lemov’s Teach like a Champion refers to “Means of Participation.”  Essentially, Lemov’s premise is that students should know exactly how to join in with each phase of a lesson.  Ben Newmark (whose blogs are well worth a read) writes: “Clarity and predictability around Means of Participation results in better lessons; better behaviour, clearer teaching and children who learn more. It results in pupils who accept the rules around lesson contributions as non-personal organisational routines that create a fair and purposeful environment.“  There are two ways to ensure that the means of participation in our lessons are clear.  Firstly, we can frontload instructions as we mentioned above (in bold).  Secondly, we can add simple icons to our PowerPoints.  It could be argued that this is taking away the need to listen. On the contrary, I’ve found the icons tend to help weaker learners and the stronger ones will focus on my instructions anyway. I would also add that the icon is often accompanied by the infinitive underneath.

Praise Praise Praise

As language teachers we’re pretty good at praise. We know every word for good, amazing, brilliant, fantastic, splendid and we encourage the students to use them in their writing. I have friends who still know tres bien from their French lessons back in the late 90s but I’m not sure the feedback was that helpful. I’ve tried altering some of the praise I give to pupils in the target language. This was partly with an aim to making it more specific (yet still comprehensible) and also helping them to hear a greater diet of words. In bold below are some phrases I will often use in target language.

Your pronunciation was perfect (this one really builds confidence “I said it right”)

98% correct. One small problem. (highlight problem) Can you repeat? (pupil repeats) Perfect

Incredible. Applause for … Very long, lots of details (with actions and occasional writing of cognates on board, detalles = details).

Great answer, one more time, more confidence please.

I don’t agree (pause) but your Spanish was perfect (often used when student has expressed a view that I disagree with such as mushrooms are tasty, Manchester United aren’t as good as …)

“Again, more passion” or “Again, stronger” Our school is currently using SHAPE to help pupils formulate better responses. This relates to the P for projection.

Displays

I have been through many displays in my time but my target language phrases one is probably the most used in class. I cannot remember where I got the phrases from but having them at the front of the room is quite useful for pointing. The blog link above will give you a flavour of the ones on the wall.

Coaching & hits/misses

It takes time in a language you are less familiar with to develop target language teaching. I suggest you have a friendly colleague who can pop in as a coach. They can praise you when you are getting it right and persevering, which helps to reinforce the routines. They can also log your hits/misses. Were there moments when you used English but simple French/German/Spanish was possible? There is not always time to reflect in a school day and this can be really helpful as long as the process is developmental and not judgmental.

What to do when it slips

Let’s be honest, it slips when we’re tired, stressed, sleep-deprived, not had tea/coffee or when we’re lacking confidence because it’s language number 3 and not your best one or you’re battling teaching 8×6 on a friday period 5. At this point, it is simply a case of get back on track as soon as you can. Don’t beat yourself up. Things that I have done in the past are:

  1. Stick TL phrases in weakest language to my desk.
  2. Stick TL phrases inside front cover of planner.
  3. Write a TL phrase at the top of my planner everyday for a week and try to get it into any lesson.
  4. Leave your door open and use TL whenever someone walks past.
  5. Tell yourself that someone is listening next door to see how much you’re using. Or actually have someone next door.
  6. Spanish minute. No-one is allowed to talk unless what they are saying is in Spanish (including the teacher), set a student to monitor it.
  7. Sometimes you just need to hit reset with a class. “I know we haven’t used as much … as I would like lately. I’ve done that too. We’re going to step it up a bit from Monday, be ready. I will be listening to hear you using …, there will be rewards if I hear lots of it from you. Likewise if you hear me using a bit too much English then you have to call me out on it.” This works better with more co-operative classes. The phrasing will need changing with less co-operative classes.

Language teaching can be exhausting. I have taught 5 new subjects to fill timetable gaps and languages seems to demand more energy than many of the others. It can be easy to slip into english, hopefully this post will help you Deutsch zu erhalten, maintenir votre français or mantener su espanol.

Evolution of Starters

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Over the time I have taught, the role and types of starter activity have varied massively. When I first started teaching, a starter was a quick activity to get the lesson off to a speedy start, ensure that every pupil was “doing something” and allow the teacher to deal with any admin (forgotten books, registers etc). The best starters were differentiated or had challenge tasks (with added chillis. If you don’t know what I mean by chillis, you’re probably better for it). This post is charting the journey of where I started to where I am now. As I researched for this post, I stumbled across MFLClassroomMagic who has a list of principles we should consider when planning starter tasks. I wish I had this list in the early days.

The Early Years

Match ups, gap fills, anagrams, spot the errors and two way translations were the name of the game in these days.

The Pros:

  • Quick to produce.
  • Environmentally friendly (no paper needed).
  • Accessible for most learners.
  • Easy to differentiate

The Cons

  • Were these cognitively demanding enough.
  • Would these have been better after introduction of vocabulary.
  • Students had to recall single words not chunks.

The Paper Based Ones

I went through a phase of paper based starters. I got to a point where I was quite quick at condensing them on to a page of 4 to a page (without needing a class set of magnifying glasses. These involved simple puzzles, gap fills or occasional Tarsia puzzles. For those unfamiliar with Tarsia, a tarsia puzzle is a shape divided into smaller shapes with clues along the inside lines that match. If you match them perfectly, you will create the shape.

Example from Mrbartonmaths.com. Whilst not language-specific, you will see the principle.

The Pros:

  • Quick to produce is using websites such as Discovery Education Puzzlemaker. 
  • Every student has something in front of them with little excuse for not doing it.
  • Students do enjoy puzzles or working things out.
  • Fallen phrase, double puzzles and letter tiles were my go-to puzzles.  Never wordsearches.

The Cons

  • Were these cognitively demanding enough?
  • Have enough glue-sticks to glue in the tarsia puzzles. Avoid tarsia puzzles during pollen season.
  • Sometimes took too long for some students and you would find them completing it in the lesson when they were meant to be on other things.
  • Again single words more likely so lost opportunity for longer chunks of transferable language.

The Vocabulary Test

I went through a phase in one school of vocabulary test starters based on learning homeworks. All students had vocabulary booklets and were allocated a section each week. 5 were Tl to English and 5 were English to TL.

The Pros:

  • Students had the resources, they just had to learn the phrases.
  • Rewards the diligent.
  • Workload light in terms of administering the test.  Tests could be marked by partner.
  • Easy to differentiate to ability groups

The Cons

  • Working out what to do with those who don’t revise or process things slowly.
  • Regular repeated failure for students can be quite demoralising.
  • Harder to make work in mixed groups. 
  • Some kids with dyslexic tendencies admitted they did not enjoy this part of the lesson.

I moved schools in 2018 and learning resources cannot be shared outside of the Trust so examples of the following cannot be given, even on request, sorry. As the Steve Smith style starters and “return of the vocabulary test” are no longer departmental or trust current practice (at least as starters, some of the activities may inevitably feature at other points in a lesson), then I will share them. The final one titled “The Hybrid” (sounds like a sci-fi film) is still in development and refinement. It may make an appearance on this blog one day.

The Steve Smith Style starters

I would characterise the next phase of my evolution as the “Steve Smith style starter.” This is not because they are solely Steve Smith creations (although they may indeed be) but mainly because they (and variations thereof) all appear in this nifty list on his website! One starter task that I cannot locate the author of (wondered if it might have been Kayleigh Merrick via Twitter. If you are reading this and it is you, and you’re not Kayleigh, then please let me know and I will happily link to your blog/Twitter feed), was “Find 4”. This could have been 4 ways to start a sentence, 4 items of vocabulary on a particular theme, 4 connecting words. One would assume that with such an activity marks would be awarded for creativity and originality.

The Pros:

  • Start/End the sentences.  I always referred to it as “starts and ends.”  Students enjoyed the freedom with this activity to finish the sentence.  Your most creative students will enjoy finishing some of these, particularly anything that involves their classmates.  Sentences such as “at the weekend … is going to” or this weekend (insert past tense activity here) said The Prime Minister (or any celeb, other teacher etc)
  • Activities like “change one thing” work really well.  You can also colour some words so that half of the room change one thing and half of the room change another thing. 
  • Convert the sentence from present to future was always challenging but I found worked better if an infinitive was given in brackets 

The Cons

  • Keeping the creativity going with these is ever so slightly trickier.
  • Odd one out was a good activity and students would enjoy it but it helps to have some phrases so students can explain their decision in TL otherwise you risk going into English for too long.  Phrases such as the ones below, allow for a bit more TL use.
    • I think the odd one out is … because of the spelling / length /meaning / type of word
    • I’ll be honest, it was a guess

Return of the Vocabulary Test

Our school moved to silent starts of lessons for the first 10minutes for all subjects and all lessons. This meant we had to be creative in what we did with our first 10mins that did not involve talking. In that time, students would have 10 phrases to change from English to TL. They were tested on the same phrases for 3-4 lessons in a row so that they got better at them.

The Pros:

  • Allowed testing of chunks and single words chosen by the teacher.
  • A positive marking scheme of “2 points for perfect 1 for close” rewarded effort.
  • Questions could get progressively tougher.
  • Students repeatedly tested on the same chunks.
  • Worked well in remote learning.

The Cons

  • Bit repetitive.
  • Hard to stop students checking previous page in book for answers.
  • Always had to go through answers, some students would copy down during this and maybe not think enough during the test.

The Hybrid

Where we are now, is a place I’m quite happy about. It takes some of the better elements of all the above. It ticks most of the boxes on MFL Classroom Magic’s list. It is not perfect (few things in education are perfect) but the direction of travel seems right There are two tasks to complete in our first ten minutes, with the suggestion they apportion their time appropriately. Elaborating on this will have to wait for another day.

Final Words

Hopefully this post stirs you to thought. Maybe that thought is “I’m really glad my school does … and not what I have just read.” Sometimes it’s quite nice to be reminded we are doing the right thing. Maybe that thought is “I can’t believe Everydaymfl is not doing this awesome thing which we do, he absolutely should know about this awesome thing!” If that is your thought then please drop it straight in the comments.

However, that thought might be “I should really look at our department starters ahead of the new term.” If the ideas above have not hit the spot then I would whole-heartedly recommend this list from MFLClassroom Magic for 25+ more ideas (with added templates). If you’re stuck after that then ask your team, they might just have a brilliant idea.

First MFL lesson of the year

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Updated from original in 2014.  This is a summary of things that I have tried and their various strengths.  For any ECT/NQTs looking for a more detailed walkthrough, I would recommend Silvia Bastow’s website, particularly this

The one thing my PGCE never prepared me for was what to do in the first lesson of the year.  I’ve now had 8-9 attempts.  As a result of different heads of department, changing schools a few years ago and different policies, I have tried many different ways of doing the first lesson of the year.  I’ll come to these later.

The biggest help you can give yourself is a strong start.  As readers of this blog will know, I’m a big fan of football and a particular club which might explain the lack of Liverpool/Man City in the following examples.  A strong start normally makes for a good season:

  • 1960 Tottenham – won first 11 games, won the league.
  • 1993 Man Utd – won 13 out of 15 opening games, won the league.  This made EverydayMFL very happy.
  • 2003 Arsenal – won 10 out of 13 opening games, won the league.

I would argue the same applies in teaching, however if you don’t manage a strong start with a class, then let me assure you that it can improve over time.  If you find after a few weeks that you are struggling then I would suggest:

  1. Talking to someone in your school.
  2. Observing others with similar classes and seeing how they manage them.
  3. Any material by Tom Bennett, Tom Sherrington and Shaun Allison Their writings were invaluable in my early career.
  4. This shameless self-promotion blog.
  5. And this blog from the same shameless self-promoting author.
  6. Bill Rogers “Cracking the hard class” is also worth a read.

How do you give yourself a strong start?

Have a Seating Plan.  Students enter the room and I tell them where I want them to sit.  Seating plans are an invaluable tool in pre-empting behaviour, learning names and establishing that it is your space they are entering.  Students with various needs will have arrangements made for their seating.  This can be done entirely in the TL (again setting standards high).  Students line up outside the room and are greeted before being asked in TL to sit in a particular seat.  As for where to sit students, I generally go with boy/girl pairings never in alphabetical order.  Some with particularly tricky behaviour records will be strategically placed, according to any intel that we have on them.  SEN/PP are also carefully considered.  Knowing who your SEN/PP students are is important.  I had one colleague who had texts of 2 tables put together, students would essentially be sat in a square and they would put them on the top right and top lefts (as they looked at it from the front).  That way they always knew.  If students disagree with the seating then I will offer them the opportunity to discuss it at the end.  If they refuse to take that opportunity then follow your school’s policy regarding defiance.     

Have every resource ready and accessible.  Slick and professional is a good way to start.  If your school has a number of sheets to glue in then make sure you have the sheets.  Make sure you know where you can get more from mid-lesson if needed (a friendly colleague or a central supply).  Make sure your PowerPoints, mini-whiteboards and whatever you intend to use are ready.  This highlights that you are in control, you are organised, you pay attention to detail and you want to maximise the time they have in the classroom.  Transitions are smooth and disruption free.  

Be prepared, start to embed routines and look calm.  Most groups will likely be quite compliant in this lesson.   It is a honeymoon period.  Do not be fooled, many students will push your boundaries over the next few weeks.  This could be through disruption, defiance or non-completion of homework.  Be ready to use the systems and don’t be afraid to do so.  Don’t be afraid to call home positively or negative in the first few weeks.  Don’t be afraid to keep a student back for a few seconds at the end for a quiet word (if time allows).  Routines are key.  If you are using a 5,4,3,2,1 silence/silencio/Ruhe system then make sure it is clear and there are consequences for anyone who falls foul of it.  It will pay off in the long run.  

Consider the student.  Some students will already have written your subject off.  Consider painting the big picture briefly at some point.  How is this subject useful?  Draw on experiences you or others have had.  I could line up 20 teachers in my school who openly have expressed regret at not learning a language.  How can you convince them that learning languages is: fun, relevant and useful?  Consider how you can create a feeling of “can do” and success in the early weeks.  Rosenshine suggests that students need a success rate of 80%.  How are 8×6 and 9y5 going to have a success rate of 80% in those early weeks?

Smile while being firm and fair.  I remember being given the “don’t smile until Christmas advice” on my PGCE.  No!  You can smile as long as you are doing your best to be firm, fair and consistent.  It’s ok to get things wrong occasionally, we are human beings and it does happen.  The key thing is how you learn from it and what you do next.  

Do not lower your standards at all.  High expectations are crucial.  It may sound harsh but will pay dividends long term.  I learnt this the hard way in my first few years.  Behaviour matters, effort matters, trying matters and homework matters.  Reward the good stuff and make sure there are consequences for the negative stuff.  Stick to the school systems as pupils will realise that you are not to be trifled with.  Occasionally, you may need to adapt your approach depending on how the class have come in.  For example, if there was a fight at lunchtime, everyone was soaked by a sudden shower or students have just come from an extremely boisterous lesson elsewhere.  This does not mean lowering your standards, expecting less work or being soft.  It is simply adapting to the evolving situation in front of you.  

If that is how we are to be in our first lessons, then we can now consider: what we do, and more importantly, what the students do.  The first decade of my teaching career involved a variety of approaches.  Here are a few “first lessons” that I have tried.  

Admin first approach

The pros of this approach is that everyone starts from the same point and all the necessary stuff is done.  Rules can be established and students are very compliant in this lesson, often regardless of ability.  In the past, this has included gluing in various sheets, going through and copying out some classroom expectations.  My rules generally were phrased positively.  Sometimes I asked students to sign underneath if they understood.  This meant I could hold them to it later if they were not playing ball.  I cannot remember my exact rules but I imagine they would have been something along the lines of…

In this class:

  • We try our best every lesson, every week.
  • We use Spanish wherever possible.
  • We are kind and we respect others.
  • We present work neatly.
  • We start tasks immediately.

My main issue with this is that sometimes there is not enough time for a language based activity or fun.  This means that students are left waiting until the next lesson for the real learning to start.  A lot of subjects also take this approach and it can get a bit monotonous if students have done it 5 times before they reach your lesson.

Lesson learnt: if showing the kids what to put on the front of their book never write an example name like “Lionel Messi” as some Year 10s don’t know who he is…as a result I taught Lionel Messi for a year, and she did alright in Spanish.

Information Gleaning Approach

Often following shortly on the heels of the “admin first” approach, the teacher may set the students a series of sentences to complete in the back of their books.

My three “go to” sentences were these:

  • I enjoy Spanish lessons particularly when …
  • Aspects of language learning I find difficult are …
  • If my last Spanish/French/German teacher were here they would say…

The latter generally is answered quite honestly.  They also give you an idea about which activities the class enjoys least (often listening, remembering lots of vocab, speaking in front of others or writing long paragraphs).  This then informs your planning for the first few weeks as you can build up to these and scaffold accordingly.  It is also quite helpful with some pupils to follow up on it later in the term.  “You said you found writing long paragraphs hard last year, has it got any easier?”

Sometimes I phrased them as questions:

  • What aspects of language learning have you been good at/struggled with in the past?
  • Which skills (speaking, listening, reading, writing) do you feel you are good at, and why?
  • If your previous teacher were here, what would they say about your performance in their lessons?

This can often be quite useful as long as students are silent when doing it.  The information needs to come from them unaffected by their peers.  If you refer to the information gleaned in subsequent lessons then this shows the students you value them.

Lesson learnt: really effective if kids are silent but also if they are lazy or unmotivated then they will probably not finish this.  That in itself is information enough.  The question is then what are you going to do about it?  

Engage then admin.

In my second year of teaching, I tried this approach of having a normal lesson first with a number of good fun activities to start the year.  It really worked with a couple of year 7 groups and year 8 groups as it allowed them to have a sense of achievement and the emphasis was on learning rather than admin.   We then completed the admin in the second lesson.  A short summary of rules were given and I made sure students kept to them.  There was a focus on speaking and listening as students had no paper to write down anything.

Lesson learnt: Short summary of rules is crucial and mini-whiteboards need to be available.  Routines around the use of mini-whiteboards need to be established quickly.

The Quiz

I tried this once and I know a great many colleagues who do this.   I even saw it on a Sixth Form Induction day lesson.  A short quiz about Spain in the first lesson is one way to fill the remaining time after admin and expectations.  I can understand the pros.  It neatly introduces the subject.  It teaches the students some cultural knowledge.  It allows you to show what you are passionate about: Spain/France/Germany/Italy.  However, I have a few reservations.  Firstly, students with low cultural capital are instantly disadvantaged.  These are also the students less likely to value MFL for the reasons in the quote below:    

“The reasons commonly put forward for the low levels of student interest are usually that English adolescents (a) do not see the relevance of foreign language learning to their future careers ; (b) since most people around the world speak English, they do not feel the urgency to learn it; (c) see foreign languages as some kind of hobby, that you do in your free time or before a trip to get by in the country you are travelling to; (d) do not feel culturally close to the target language civilizations.”  Gianfranco Conti 2015

Secondly, Gianfranco Conti highlights the importance of self-efficacy as a factor in motivation.  Why start the year with a quiz that most students will fail on a subject to which they are not “culturally close”? Conti describes self-efficacy using Bandura’s definition: “beliefs in one’s capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to produce given attainments.”  Why would we not take the first few lessons to really build confidence?  Surely it is more important that students leave our early lessons with the motivation and the belief: “I can do this.” 

Lastly, there is an opportunity being missed to embed routines around target language, speaking activities and having fun using the language.

That’s a lengthy answer to “Why don’t I do quizzes in the first lesson?”  Feel free to disagree in the comments below.

The Hybrid

In my current school, we seem to manage a hybrid of both “admin first” and “straight in”.  Books and sheets are swiftly given out.  Rules and expectations are outlined.  We then get straight into learning or revising content from a previous year.  If it is Y7 then we will start on meeting and greeting.  If it is Y8,9,10,11 then we will get started on the topic for the term.  Personally, I have never been a fan of quizzes about the country in the first lesson.  I prefer that they leave my room feeling that they can do something in the TL, or have learnt something. That doesn’t mean that the cultural stuff is not important but when it comes to culture, I prefer teaching them the various cultural aspects as they arise, or linking them to a topic.  I have yet to write a post on teaching culture so maybe that will come at some point.

Lessons learnt: So far this hybrid model seems to be may preferred method.  It makes expectations and rules clear but then gets on with the first priority: learning.

Dear Santa. For my PGCE in MFL, I would like…

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Time for a reflective post.  After seeing some trainees move on to a new school, I got thinking about what I have learnt since my PGCE and things I wished I had learnt when I trained back in 2011-2012. 

When I trained, there was a time of flux in teaching.  We had just embarked upon the era of controlled assessment, the Department for Education was headed up by Gove and OFSTED were very keen on progress in lessons, in books and engagement.  We were taught about the importance of literacy and numeracy, teaching that suited student’s learning styles and differentiation.  We covered behaviour and voice management twice over that year.  We learnt about what Ofsted wanted in terms of engagement.  All students had to be “engaged”, teacher talk had to be minimal, mini-plenaries were regular and objectives had to be clearly stated and revisited to demonstrate that all learners had made progress in that 50 minute lesson.  Most CPD was either going on a course, watching another teacher, or being watched yourself, which carried with it the aforementioned expectations.  Webinars, podcasts and even blogs were in their infancy.  At the time I remember my main sources of internet based CPD being Frenchteacher.net, Classteaching and Tom Sherrington’s blog.  All of these were and are quality blogs and have clearly stood the test of time.  If you are starting out in your career, I would recommend the teachers guide you can find on Frenchteacher (although for an expanded version you can buy Steve’s books on Amazon) and Tom’s Pedagogy Postcards.

In MFL specifically, we were taught activities for lessons.  We were taught to progress towards production. We were taught how to conduct a textbook listening (play once with no questions, play once with questions, play again with questions and breaks then go through answers), how to help students prepare for their controlled assessments and learn chunks of text. However, I don’t recall my course mentioning Macaro, Field, Krashen, Van Patten and it sadly pre-dated the advent of Rachel Hawkes‘s website and Gianfranco Conti’s writings.  I discovered Steve Smith‘s blog reasonably earlier on and found it invaluable.  Schools that were using technology tended to use the triumvirate of Linguascope, languagesonline (to be fair I am still using this), or Atantot.  

Over time, I have had to unlearn a lot of what I learnt on my PGCE.  Learning Styles were dispatched by Daniel T Willingham (whose book “Why don’t students like school?” received the everydaymfl treatment here).  Mini-plenaries started to fade out of the MFL vocabulary.  Yellow backgrounds, blue writing and comic sans (shudder) were highlighted as the dyslexia friendly PowerPoint combination at the time, whereas the British Dyslex!a Association now have some great recommendations.  Teaching has changed a lot.  In some ways for the better and in other ways less so.  Reflecting that at a subject level, MFL has changed a lot.  

If I was designing a PGCE for MFL now, I would hope that it answers the questions below over the year.  If it doesn’t then, I am aware that there are a number of excellent books by Steve smith and Gianfranco Conti that will help in doing so. I would hope that your PGCE also teaches you what we might call the generic elements of teaching that apply across all subjects.  By generic elements I’m referring to the kind of thing you might find in Rosenshine’s Principles or Lemov’s Teach like a Champion.  

Anyway, from the MFL side of things.  Here goes…

Dear Santa.

For my PGCE in MFL, I would like…

Simple Letter to Santa | Free SVG

 

Speaking

  • How do we teach pronunciation?
  • How do we teach phonics?
  • How do we help reluctant speakers to speak more?
  • How do we develop the memory of short reusable chunks of language?
  • What speaking activities are developing learner’s memory and ability to deploy phrases?
  • How do we make the TL the regular language of classroom interaction?
  • How do we develop a culture of “everyone talks”?

Listening

  • How do we develop listening skills?
  • What different ways are there to conduct a textbook listening?
  • How do we make listening feel less like a test?
  • How do we use transcripts effectively without giving students all the answers?
  • What is comprehensible input?

Reading

  • How do you use a reading text progressively so that activities become more challenging?
  • How do we teach readers how to read and avoid guesswork?
  • How does reading help acquisition of language?
  • How do you get the balance between a text that is 98% comprehensible and not making it too easy?
  • How do we support students with a primary school level reading age in reading a foreign language?
  • How do we integrate authentic texts, literary texts and short stories in such a way that they can be challenging but accessible?

Writing

  • How do we help students to structure writing?
  • How do we help students to use the language that they know better?
  • How do we help lower ability students to write 90 words?
  • How do we help students of high ability to write in a way that prefers them for A-level?
  • What should a student be able to write in Y7, Y8, Y9, Y10, Y11?
  • How do we help students in  contexts where they may never have been on holiday to answer the question “¿Adónde fuiste de vacaciones?”

Grammar

  • What grammar should be taught at what stage?
  • How do you stop students saying things like “me gusta juego” and “me hago” etc? (asking for a friend…)
  • How do we teach some of the areas of grammar that do not have simple English equivalents such as the partitive article in French, subjunctive in Spanish and cases in German?

Vocabulary

  • How do we ensure learners get a good balance of nouns, adjectives and verbs when textbooks seem to be very noun heavy?
  • How can we make use of web-based applications to help reinforce and extend vocabulary?  

Target Language

  • How do we use target language in lessons so that it is comprehensible? 
  • How do you maintain target language throughout a lesson in a language you are less confident with?
  • How do you adapt your target language to the ability of the group in front of you?
  • How do you encourage learners to use more the target language in lessons?
  • What do you do when learners start to use *&£$%^ words they have looked up in a lesson?

Second language acquisition theories & concepts

  • What theories have dominated the field of second language acquisition?
  • What can we take from each and use in practice? 
  • What are the current theories?  What are their benefits?  How can we use this to enhance teaching?

Memory

  • What is retrieval practice and how does it apply to MFL?
  • How can we use homework to effectively combat Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve?
  • Rather than simply telling students to “learn vocab”, how can we do it in ways that ensure longer term retention and more thorough processing?
  • How does the brain store and retrieve language?  
  • How do you revisit content so that students “know and remember more” without it being too repetitive that they switch off and lose interest?

Lesson Planning

  • What are good starter tasks for MFL lessons?
  • How do you phrase a good lesson objective for an MFL lesson?
  • How do you sequence activities to reach that objective?
  • Is it appropriate to have production every lesson?
  • How do you plan a sequence of lessons over time so that content is revised effectively?
  • How do you adapt lessons for SEND learners?  
  • What are the common barriers dyslexic students face in MFL and what are the most effective ways to overcome them?
  • How do you check for understanding quickly and effectively?

Transitions

  • What are the common barriers that learners face moving into secondary school from primary?
  • How do we overcome these barriers?
  • How can we develop closer links with primary schools when time, resources and funding are limited?
  • How can we ensure learners are ready for A-level so that the jump is not too big?
  • How can we develop closer links with sixth forms to increase progression?
  • How do you drive up options numbers in a school where languages are not prioritised highly? 
  • In a Welsh context where many students have to study Welsh, how do you drive up options numbers as any foreign language is additional and cuts down on the amount of option choices a student has?

Status:

  • How do you raise the profile of MFL?
  • What profile raising projects are most effective?
  • How do you raise the profile of MFL in a school with low budgets?
  • How do you combat the “I did GCSE FRench and I can’t remember any of it” line on parents evening?
  • How do you combat the “I’m never going to need … anyway” line from students?

On changing schools

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A few years ago, I moved schools and forgot to post this.  Maybe you have moved school and this one could be useful to you.

I learnt a lot from MFL teachers and colleagues in other departments my first school.  I developed a lot as a teacher and a person.  I worked with some amazing teachers and fantastic students.  However, the time had definitely arrived where a change was needed.

Maybe you’re thinking the same?  You could be contemplating the next rung up the ladder, a change of scenery, a change of department or a change of key stage.  In this post, I’ll look at things that remain the same, things that change and things that help to hit the ground running.  Perhaps the biggest thing I noticed in moving is that everything is the same and yet simultaneously everything is different.  Hopefully the rest of the blog unpicks that paradoxical statement.

SAME

Kids are still kids.  It might be the most obvious thing to say but even if you are moving to a more challenging school then it is worth bearing in mind: they are still children.  Some will try to push boundaries, unsettle the new person and test you.  Others will get on board immediately and give you no problems at all.  The adoption bell curve model from the business world suggests that when selling change or a vision to a group you will have the following clusters of people.  From my limited experience so far, I have found this model remarkably applicable to classrooms.  The following was paraphrased from Forbes

  • Innovators (2.5% of population).  These guys will get on board with anything new.
  • Early Adopters (13.5% of population).  People who drive change in an organisation, quite often leaders.
  • Early majority (34%).  People who join once they see the benefits of the change.
  • Late majority (34%).  Skeptics.  People who join after the early majority.  Often will need some convincing or coaxing.
  • Laggards (16%).  People who are stuck in their ways.  These are tricky to convince.

If you get the first 3 groups then you are at 50%.  The subsequent 34% will likely start to tip the balance in your classes.  Of that 34% there will be some quite late adopters who don’t fall into the “laggards” category.  If even half of those get on board then you are at 67%.  

It is worth adding at this point that while kids are still kids, you will see variations depending on the schools you move between.  You may move from a moderately challenging catchment to a less challenging one, or from the frying pan into the fire.  Parents may have different expectations, which then influences in-classroom behaviour.  Don’t be afraid to approach your DSL and pastoral team to get a better idea of the challenges and overall character of the catchment.

You are good at your subject and teaching it.  You have qualifications including GCSEs, A-levels, a degree and a PGCE.  You may even have more letters after your name.  You may be a native speaker of a language or at near-native level in many languages.  You are the one that has trained to teach this subject.  You know a variety of methods, strategies, stories and ways to make the subject come to life and engage learners.  Your enthusiasm and love for your subject will carry people with you.  You know all the advice you have been given over time.  In a new setting, you have a great opportunity to further improve but also develop new habits.  Your new department may also have certain initiatives that may develop your teaching and alter your lessons in a way you had not expected.  You will have different people observing you and giving you feedback, which hopefully makes you even better at your job.

DIFFERENT 

Starting points vary wildly.  This was probably the one that took me by surprise most.  Going from a comprehensive school with a number of feeder primaries to another comprehensive school with a number of feeder primaries, I made the assumption that the year 7s would be similar.  I was wrong.  Get to know your catchment and their starting points.  In addition, in languages, we have the added complexity of the patchwork nature of primary school MFL.  There are primary schools out there doing sterling work, however the experience of languages held by your students can vary wildly.  This may have an impact upon your Year 7.    

New/Old is not always better.  It is really easy to make comparisons between your previous and current departments.  We make sense of things often by comparing to expectation or experience.  In changing schools you could go from the frying pan into the fire, or from the fire into the frying pan, or just from one kitchen worktop to another (if that’s not stretching the metaphor too far).  The key is accepting that it is different and not necessarily better or worse.  Learning when to play the “in my old department” card is key.  Don’t do it too often, but if it is a strong strategy that makes a tangible difference to pupils learning then there is no reason not to suggest it.

Context is crucial.  One of your first jobs in starting at the new school is to gain an understanding of the context you are in.

  • What is the area/estate like?
  • What challenges do the kids face outside of school?
  • How involved are parents?
  • How many go on to further study?

Subject status in your school may be different

Maybe you have moved from a school where everybody does languages to one where it is optional.  Maybe languages are highly valued by SLT; maybe they are not.  These are aspects of life in your new school that you may need to navigate.  Remember: you were picked at interview because of what you offered.  What can you offer your school to raise the profile of MFL?  How can you help to improve uptake or outcomes?

HITTING THE GROUND RUNNING

Know the key people.  Having a HoD, HoY or SLT member to call on in difficult situations does help.  Obviously try to deal with it yourself first but if you need to refer up the food chain then do it.  Don’t be afraid to call a parent positively or negatively.

Know your students.  Seating plans are invaluable. Learn their names as quickly as possible.  Be interested in what they tell you even if you don’t understand TikTok.  Praise effort.  Don’t overlook the quiet kids. Jamie Thom writes “If the adjective “quiet” is used, it is often pejorative: “Daniel is a lovely student, but he is very quiet. He really needs to speak up more.”  How are you going to ensure the quiet kids in your class are able and confident in a subject which requires a lot of talk.

Know the systems.  Behaviour policies and practices are crucial in making a smooth start.  One colleague advised me to be “firm, fair and consistent”.  That sounds manageable but is not always easy to pull off.  Stick to the behaviour policy and when the inevitable “but in Mr Mainwaring’s class…”* is voiced then the answer is “maybe…but I’m asking you to…”

*as with most names on this website Mr Mainwaring is taken from television

Invest in relationships.  Put time into getting to know the kids you are teaching.  Get involved in something outside your subject.  Get to know your tutor group.  Be human.  Acknowledge mistakes if and when you make them.  Remember you are allowed to smile before Christmas but definitely maintain your high expectations throughout the year.

Invest in routines.  How do you start the lesson?  In my current school, all lessons start with a silent starter task.  It’s helpful in terms of setting the tone and expectation.  Use the first five lessons with each class to teach your routines (and more if necessary).  How do you expect students to start?  How do you expect them to participate?  How do you use mini-whiteboards?  How do you finish lessons?

Stick at it.  The first year in a new school can be tough.  In many ways, the second year is easier.  Students know you.  In my experience, students will often check their new timetable by their peers or their siblings.  “I’ve got Mr Wilson and Mr Jones this year, what are they like?”  Quite often, I have found students decide quite quickly that you are “ok” based on their sibling’s or friend’s opinion.  Or sometimes they decide the contrary and need winning round!  I was told shortly before the end of term by a Y10 student I taught in Y8 “we all really loved that lesson at the start of the week.”  It was a great class and I genuinely looked forward to Monday P1 that year.  I will guarantee now that not every class says that about me!!  However, these guys carry that impression of lessons 2 years later and will pass it on to their siblings and their peers.  Returning to our Forbes model, it does help increase your early adopters and early majority in the subsequent years.  

Lean on support when necessary

Sometimes you will need to lean on the experience of others.  In the early days at a new school, there will be things you don’t know or didn’t absorb in the INSET day.  Sometimes this support will come from teachers and other times from students “Sir, have you taken the register yet?”  Don’t be afraid to ask the “how” questions of your pastoral team, heads of year, heads of department, SEND team or tutors.  How do I get the best out of Charles Godfrey?  How does Joe Walker do in your lessons?  Jack Jones seems to struggle with …, what works with him?

If you are changing schools this September, then I offer you my very best wishes.  I hope you have a great start, you meet some great classes and just happen to have a free lesson P5 on a Friday.

Everyday Displays

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Over the past 9-10 years, I have had a number of classroom displays. I’ll be the first to admit, I’m not very artistic. I look at some of the displays I see on Twitter and think “that looks incredible”, shortly followed by “I could never do that.” If you search MFL displays on Twitter you will soon see what I mean, along with a wonderfully deadpan nativity one! Here is what I can do with my limited artistic abilities and have done. Hopefuly ahead of the new term, it inspires some ideas.

When it comes to displays, I think there two types of display:

  1. Learning
  2. Inspiring

The kind of questions we need to be asking are:

  1. How does this display help my students learning, or help me while teaching?
  2. Is this display doing the thinking for them or making them do some thinking?
  3. Is this helping to inspire a love of languages, an understanding of their value or an appreciation of culture?

I have 4 display boards in my classroom.

Display Board 1 (front) – TL phrases I want students to use in lessons

Display Board 2 (side) – Phonics board – this is an experiment from September

Display Board 3 (back) – Why study langauges

Display Board 4 back) – Map of Spain

My Current Displays

I’m aware that some people out there argue in favour of a “less is more” approach from a perspective of aiming to reduce visual stimulus in a classroom. I can completely see their point of view and definitely lean more towards this now than I did when I first started teaching.

Display Board 1: TL Phrases

File:WA 80 cm archery target.svg - Wikimedia Commons

I cannot find the original online so it is entirely possible my Head of Department made this. The phrases on this board are largely similar to this one on TES: https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/spanish-classroom-language-mat-12359711 The overriding aim in any display like this is that it has to be stuff that students are actually going to use. We have quite a strict equipment policy in our school so any “I have forgotten a pen/book” phrase is out. The rationale for having this at the front of the room is that I can just tap the board if a pupil asks me something in English that could easily be done in Spanish. Phrases it includes are:

“te toca a ti” (your turn) “espera un momento” (wait a second) “lo he dicho bien?” (did I say it right?)

he puesto (I’ve put…) “creo que es” (i think it’s…) “no es justo” (it’s not fair)

Display Board 2: Phonics

Credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeffdjevdet/20611280311 Owner requests speedpropertybuyers.co.uk/ be credited

This is an experiment for this year. I wanted pupils to be a bit more conscious of how words are formed in Spanish and essentially take a bit more responsibility in working out how they are said. That way if someone says “I don’t know how to say it”, they can break the word down and reconstruct it. This uses some enlarged slides from Rachel Hawkes’ phonics powerpoints here.

Display Board 3: Why study languages

Question Mark Response - Free image on Pixabay

This one is at the back of the room so chances are students are only going to see it when they are a) walking in and b) turning around to look at the clock (how dare they!). It could be more prominently placed if my classroom allowed for it but the material on there is large enough to read even with a cursory glance. Again, I am not the most artistic of people so my first trip was to Instant Displays for some lettering and then to use these resources from NST.

Display Board 4: Map of Spain

File:CCAA of Spain (Blank map).PNG - Wikimedia Commons

If I’m honest this is the one I am most proud of. It took a while to make so here is how:

You will need:

  • yellow and blue display paper
  • A marker pen
  • a projector that projects on to a whiteboard

Here is how to do it:

  1. Find this map of Spain.
  2. Fix yellow display paper to your whiteboard.
  3. Project map on to the yellow paper.
  4. Draw around the outline map adding dots for places.
  5. Remove yellow paper from whiteboard.
  6. Cut it out.
  7. Cover display board in blue paper (sea).
  8. Fix your map of Spain in the middle.
  9. Write on the places.
  10. Don’t forget the Canary Islands and the Balearic Islands.

This tends to be used quite regularly in lessons particularly when a place is mentioned in a text. It can be quite helpful to say: “This place is here. If you have been to … then you were not very far way from it.”

One year we also put some stars on places where students and staff in the school had been to Spain and where.

With apologies to Portugal.

Other things on the walls

The Weather: Students in our lessons write the date, learning aim (post on learning aims and objectives in the works) and weather.

Numbers 1-20: This is quite useful for lower ability classes when getting feedback on tasks. “How many people scored …?” Or for randomly selecting the next person. “Charlie, pick a number between 1-20.” you count along the rows for the next person. This is of course when you are not using Wheel of Names.

Both of these can be found at Instant Displays.

Spanish Speaking countries: This is quite a nice poster set by Twinkl. You can check it out here.

My Past Displays

The Sentence Builder

In the past I have turned a display into a giant sentence builder. The sentence builder was modelled on one in this video from Vincent Everett (the sentence builder appears at the 3min 20), which uses modal verbs and infinitives. It was extremely helpful to students, however I quickly learnt I needed to cover it up during tests!!! He also has an excellent blog, which you should check out. His Toblerone idea will be making it into a lesson in September.

Origami Houses

You can find out how to make these here

I set up a display board as above and then populated it with the origami houses that the students had made. I asked a few students to print off some useful vocabulary that could float in clouds in the sky, which they duly did….only with a few additions such as the house from Up! and the Death Star from Star Wars.

The Three Tenses Board

This was quite a simple idea from my previous Head of Department but effective. It contained 30 phrases all students had to know. His original looked something like the table below. I will let you decide what verbs should make it into the 30.

PastPresentFuture
J’ai mangéJe mangeJe vais manger
J’ai buJe boisJe vais boire

Teaching Spanish at the time I simply adapted the phrases. Again, this was a “cover up during assessments” board.

Hopefully, this has inspired you with a few ideas. I have probably done others that I cannot remember but these are the ones that I feel answered the three questions best.

You want us to write how much?!

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This Blogpost was inspired by a Twitter conversation I have seen over the past week or so and posted a whole year later.  Sorry it took so long! 

The 150 Word Question appears on the higher GCSE paper.  It is the showcase question.  This is where 5 years of hard work in Spanish needs to appear on the page.

Irrespective of whether you follow a 2 year or 3 year Key Stage 3, I tend to introduce this in Year 10.  Below I will explain how I did it.  The suggestions are similar to some suggestions by two teachers on Twitter.  I will say now that the similarity is entirely coincidental and it was quite reassuring to read their tweets, as I means I might just be doing the right thing!

Here is how I went about getting my class ready for 150 Word Questions:

  1. Show class a question.  Explain to them that this is the showcase question.  It has to show them at their best and what we have spent 4-5 years teaching them.
  2. Translate question in pairs, then share answers.
  3. See if class can divide the two bullet points into three, four or five sections.
  4. Divide 150 by number of sections to give approximate and more manageable word counts  (3 x 50 word sections sounds more achievable)
  5. Go through how it is marked, including how many opinions, justifications etc are needed.  Unpacking phrases such as “narrate events” is also worth a few minutes of your time.
  6. Divide class into groups of 3-4.  They write the best section they possibly can on mini-whiteboards or on paper with alternating lines (any means that allows editing).  This means tenses, opinions, reasons, conjunctions, adverbs.  Remind students that if they have speaking prep that matches the bullet point then they use it.
  7. Remind students of their core language sheets and encourage use of them when writing.
  8. Remind students of their Top 10 Complex Language sheets and encourage use of at least 2-3 phrases from it.
  9. Students compose sections, If they finish then they can try another section.
  10. Hand in mini-whiteboards.
  11. Teacher types up student contributions into a 150 word answer.  Mark it and annotates it with why it scores high marks.  If you have a visualiser, you could do this live.
  12. Students then attempt a similar question in subsequent lesson.  They are allowed their example one, along with core language and complex language sheets.  They cannot copy but can adapt it.  They do this on their own.  You could then mark it or take in a few and give generic feedback.  Students do appreciate knowing how they scored on a first attempt.

Explaining a couple of terms above:

  • Core Language Sheets – idea from Rachel Hawkes.
  • Complex Language Sheets – basically A* language from use back in the day (wow I sound old) of controlled assessments.  Mix of simple memorable subjunctive, past tense, future tense phrases “cuando sea mayor”, “si tuviera la oportunidad, iría a…” etc or “bien que ce soit”

What happens next?

Probably, I will get back to teaching the course, as later in the year they will likely have a mock exam or an assessment point so they can do one without support then.  They also have two good versions to revise from!  Combining the graduated approach above, along with regular practice of 90 word questions should help in preparing for that.  

Other thoughts

  • Encourage students to avoid duplication of vocabulary.  Ban the boring adjectives!  “boring”, “nice”, “interesting” and “fun”.  Instead things can be pleasant, enjoyable and exciting.  
  • Remind them that the poor examiner has to read loads of these and they are all 150 words long!  Encourage them to make it different to the average student.  Tell them they play piano in their room rather than football at the park.  They do not “go to the park with my friends”.  They “go to the cinema with my little brother who is <insert adjective here>”.  Again an opportunity for a more interesting adjective here (but not too interesting)
  • Remember that avoid does not mean you can’t use them when your mind goes blank.
  • Cutting the question into manageable chunks is always helpful.  Can one bullet point be divided into two?  To some of our students 40+40+75 does not sound as bad as 75+75.   
  • Lastly: make a plan.  What language am I going to use?  How can I show off?

 

 

5 Things to try tomorrow 2019 Edition!

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A very Happy belated New Year to you.  If you’re reading for the first time then you are very welcome!  Over 10,000 busy teachers visited last year from countries all over the world.  Hopefully, you found something useful.  Anyway, to kick off this year, here are 5 things you can try tomorrow.

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Photo Credit: Ekspresevim Flickr via Compfight cc

Vocab Sheet/Knowledge Organiser Dice Quiz

Some schools have vocabulary sheets, some have knowledge organisers.  Get some 12 sided dice and set 12 chunks/items for students to test each other.  They need to produce the Spanish for this activity to be most effective.  Students test each other on 5 things.  My year 8s are working through a foods topic so the phrases they were testing each other on primarily concerned restaurants.

  • 3pts – perfect recall without help.
  • 2pts – needed sheet to prompt
  • 1pts – needed sheet but not correct
  • 0pts – silent response

Quick run-through:

Harvey rolls dice, rolling a 9.  He looks at the screen.  His partner  Lewis has to do  task 9.  Lewis reads task 9.  “Order a dessert”.  Lewis consults his vocabulary sheet and says “quiero un helado de chocolate”.  Lewis has achieved 2 points.  He then rolls the dice for Harvey.

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Double chance to win bingo

Students divide a mini-whiteboard into 6.  They put three adjectives and three nouns into the spaces.  This worked best with school subjects and opinions.  Bingo was one of the go-to games for my German teacher in year 7.  I find doing it this way forces learners to listen to more of what you say.  I guess you could do it with 9 squares and alter the verb too.  The Year 7s loved it this week.

me gusta la geografia porque es útil

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Bomb Defusal

Using a writing frame, put a sentence from it on a mini-whiteboard.  Learners have 10 opportunities to defuse the bomb or a set time limit using this website.  Very simple guessing game but actually allows you to check their pronunciation of the target structures.  Make it more interesting by having the first person pick the next person, who picks the next person.  Or use a random name generator.

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Live Marking

This was sold to me a year or so ago as a way to “dramatically reduce your marking load”.  This idea from a history teacher was that you went around the class adding comments to kids work such as “how could you develop this point further?”.  The kid then had to respond instantly.  In humanities subjects I can see it being effective.  I came up with a variation recently designed to help a class that are not particularly confident speakers..  Here’s how it works:

  • Find a text in TL (textbooks are great for this).
  • Work student by student having them read out the text – no prior preparation.
  • With each student write a quick note in their book on their speaking.  Here are a few examples:
    • 15/1  Speaking: “superb today – no issues.”
    • 15/1  Speaking: “check words with LL otherwise fine.”
    • 15/1  Speaking: “check words with “CE.”
    • 15/1  Speaking: “pronunciation fine, now try to sound more confident.”
  • If you feel that they need to respond in some way, write out a series of words containing the target sound and work through them with the student.  Or get them to redo the line.

Students seemed motivated by it and seem more confident as a result.  As a teacher, it is quick simple feedback and if a response is needed then you can do one very quickly!  It takes very little time to do a whole class.

Sense/Nonsense Listening

This is a really simple warm-up activity prior to a recorded listening on a similar topic.  Recently year 8 working through the food topic and have arrived at restaurant situations.   This one was a bit of a “off the cuff” thing.  Read out a sentence.  Students have to listen carefully and decide if it is “sense” or “nonsense” based on vocabulary they have covered recently.

  1. De primer plato quiero una tortilla española con helado de chocolate.
  2. De segundo plato quiero una sopa de manzana.
  3. De segundo plato quiero un filete con patatas fritas.
  4. Por la mañana juego al fútbol con mis amigos
  5. A las dos de la noche juego al baloncesto
  6. me gusta el inglés porque es interesante
  7. No me gusta el teatro porque es divertido

The possibilities are endless.

 

 

 

 

European Day of Languages

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It is that time of year again and it always comes around really fast.  European Day of Languages.  If your school does not take part then this is your opportunity.  It is great free publicity for your subject!  Not to place ideas in any of your heads but you could even call it “Languages Week”…

There are many ideas out there, resources on TES and even on the EDL website itself.  Here are a few I have seen work over the years…

Update: ALL have also produced some ideas here.

School site quiz quest.

This one requires some prior preparation, you will require: a quiz on paper, answers on paper, blue tac, sweets.  Give students a set of quiz questions with answers around the school in creative places. Put the answers up a few days before announcing to generate interest.  Any students who complete the quiz in their breaks and lunches get some kind of reward.  It is very likely you will have a fair number of keen year 7s for this.  Students collect the quiz sheets from you and hand in to an agreed location.

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Tutor time quizzes/videos.

Some schools do not have a tutor time programme so create one for the week.  Your other staff will often get on board if they are invited to take part.  If they are forced then they may resent it.  My experience was that 2/3 of staff would willingly go along with it.

We did the following:

  1. Quiz on a different European country each day.
  2. Video on a different European city each day.
  3. The register in a different language each day (modelled and practised in staff briefing of course).
  4. Staff used Digital Dialects to teach themselves and the kids a new language
  5. Some members of staff taught languages they knew such as Gaelic, Spanish Welsh and Hebrew.
  6. Some members of staff from other countries insisted on registers being done in the language in their classes!
  7. Some members of staff kept the language from registration going all day.

Who speaks what? Display board

Do you have pupils and staff from other countries?  Prepare a display with a photo and a short bio as to what languages they speak, how they learnt and how much they can still do.

Who speaks what? Video interviews

Get around your multilingual staff and interview them about their experiences of language learning.  How easy/difficult did they find it?  What are the benefits and advantages of speaking a language? You could show the videos in an assembly or tutor time.

Displays

Various famous people have learnt languages.  If you want a list then here are a few…  It didn’t take long to create a nice PowerPoint background, add a picture from the internet and a text box with the languages they have learnt.  These then went along the corridor.

  • Bradley Cooper – French.
  • Carlo Ancelotti – English, French, Spanish.
  • Mark Zuckerberg – Mandarin.
  • Zlatan Ibrahimovic – English, Spanish, Italian.
  • Tom Hiddeston – Spanish, French, Greek.
  • Tom Daley – Spanish.
  • José Mourinho – English, Spanish, Italian, French.
  • Natalie Portman – German, Spanish, Japanese.
  • Colin Firth – Italian.
  • Viggo Mortenson – Spanish, French, Norwegian, Italian.
  • Dory – Whale.*
  • Christoph Waltz – French, English, Italian.

*may not be a recognised language

Assemblies

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I appreciate that some readers may have visibly tensed up at this suggestion.  It is a great bit of free advertising for your subject!  Two years ago, I did an assembly titled “I never planned to teach languages”.  It went down really well.  We began with a quiz of film quotes translated into other languages (we used google, more on the evils of google here).  They got sweets for guessing  the film and the quote. Languages such as Portuguese, Dutch and Romanian are great for this.  Then I started telling a little bit of my story about how I got into MFL teaching and where it has taken me.  If you’re interested in that story, or in need of a good night’s sleep then you can read a bit here.

Dress up

One of my former colleagues is a little too keen on this idea… I’ll let your imagination take care of this one.

Foreign Food Stall/Tasting – courtesy of a great colleague from previous school.

Bring in plenty of foreign foods for kids to try at a breaktime.  Staff and students could contribute to this.  This could be run much like a cake sale with profits going to a language related charity or a charity run in a European country.  Efforts we had one year included Schwarzwaldkirschetorte, Tortilla Española, Tarte au Citron Apfelstrudel and Croissants.  You could even insist on orders being given in the foreign language.

Get the canteen involved.

If your canteen is up for it, then take over the menu for a week.  I’ve given each day a theme as they will know what is practical.  As nice as it may be to have a Croquembouche, it might be a little too much to ask!

  • Monday – French.
  • Tuesday – Spanish.
  • Wednesday – Welsh (that’s for Secondary MFL matters in Wales – you guys are great).
  • Thursday – German.
  • Friday – Portuguese.

Your canteen staff will probably welcome the opportunity to vary the menu a bit, just give them plenty of warning.

Language Learning Videos

Here are a set of videos with a pro-language learning theme.

 

Funny Foreign Language Videos

Who doesn’t love a funny or odd Youtube video at some point? Here are a few favourites from the past few years:

This one had the kids saying “poom” for a few days.

PE Department will approve of this one!

One semester clearly hasn’t convinced her…

 

What do you do?  Share your ideas on Twitter

5 Things to try tomorrow

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These may already form part of your everyday teaching repertoire but here are five activities to try tomorrow.  Each has a differentiation and challenge added.

Quiz Quiz Trade

Everyone I know seems to understand this one differently.  I have seen it used in MFL and English in different ways.  It can probably be applied to other subjects too.  Here’s how I make it work in my classroom.

  1. Get the mini-whiteboards ready
  2. Project on screen 3 questions students have been learning.
  3. Students pick one of the questions and write it on their board.
  4. Students go around the room.  They must ask a question, answer a question and then swap whiteboards.
  5. They must perform 5,6,7,8 swaps before heading back to their seat.

Differentiation: You can differentiate this by getting students to write the start of an answer on the other side of the whiteboard.

Front of whiteboard:   ¿Qué llevas normalmente?

Back of whiteboard:    Llevo…

Challenge: You could have students put a word on the back of the whiteboard that has to be incorporated into the answer.   You could increase the variety of questions used or vary tenses used by questions.

Rewards: whilst the students are doing this, go around, listen and note down the ones who are going for it.  Reward them at some point in a manner of your choosing.

MM Paired Speaking

MM are the initials of the excellent teacher who showed me this.  It is an information gap activity but I like it as it practises speaking, listening, reading and writing.

  1. Students divide page into 3 columns
  2. Column 1 – write days of week in TL leaving 2-3 lines in between each
  3. Column 2 – pupils draw picture that represents vocab they have been learning such as places in town.
  4. Column 3 – leave blank.
  5. Project on board a question such as ¿Adónde vas el lunes? (where do you go on Monday?).  You could also project a model answer “el lunes voy al cine” (Mondays I go to the cinema).
  6. Model the activity with a keen student.  This stage is crucial for the activity to work well.
  7. Fiona asks Shrek where he goes on each day of the week.  When Shrek answers, Fiona uses her final column to write down exactly what he says.
  8. Shrek and Fiona swap roles.

Differentiation: Weaker students might need this printing out on paper.

Challenge:  You could increase the complexity of the sentence demanded by insisting pupils add an opinion.  This could be done by adding a column in between 2 and 3.

Car Race Quiz

I resurrected this little gem this week.  I cannot find the original car race powerpoint but you will find similar powerpoints here by the same author.  Car race, horse race or (at Christmas) race to Bethlehem should work.  For those of you big on knowledge organisers, this could be a different way to test them.

  1. Have a list of questions ready to test everything in a unit from key vocabulary to how to form various tenses or structures covered.
  2. Divide class into teams
  3. Teams take it in turns to answer.
  4. If they are right then click the car/horse/wise man (whichever you choose to download) and they will gradually move towards the finish line.  If a team is unable to answer, pass it to another team.
  5. Winners are first to the finish line.

Differentiation:  This can come through the questions you ask and how you tailor the activity to the students in front of you.

Challenge: you could turn this activity into a translation challenge.  First group to produce correct translation of a particular phrase gets to move their car forward.

Song gap fills

I don’t do these too often but a colleague of mine did one with a class recently.  Find a song and take out a variety of vocabulary.  You could look for words with a particular phoneme that you want students to practice or remove some verbs you have learnt recently. They listen twice or three times trying to put in the missing words and then you show them the lyric video for them to check their answers.

It is best done last lesson of the day or you will be hearing it all day.  Whilst my colleague suggested Kevin y Karla (check their Youtube channel out),  This one was a hit with my year 9s:

Differentiation: depends on the quantity words you take out.

Challenge: have two versions with words removed.  Remove significantly more from one version, or equally put the wrong words in and students correct them.

12 sided dice topic revision

If you have a set of these then great.  If not then tell students to roll a six sided die twice and add the numbers.

Set 12 tasks on the screen that link to the topic you have been studying. Give each task a points score according to complexity.

1 Simple vocabulary recall task

2 Explain grammar structure

3 Translate something

4 Make a sentence including …

etc

Differentiation: you could pair up students who are at a similar level.  You could turn it into a rally-coach task (the more advanced student does their own task but coaches a weaker individual to help them achieve).

Challenge: depends on the complexity of tasks set

GCSE: Customs & Festivals

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800px-Santiago_Sacatepequez_Kite_Festival

Picture of Santiago Sacatepequez by gringologue [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

The Spanish speaking world is full of a variety of festivals.  From the perilous San Fermín to the picturesque Fiesta de los Patios en Córdoba or contemplative Semana Santa.  If you look further afield you will find El Día de Los Muertos/El Día de La Muerte,  and El Yipao in Colombia.

AQA refers to this topic as “customs and festivals in Spanish speaking countries/communities”.

Pearson/Edexcel refer to it as “celebrations and festivals”.

WJEC refer to it as: “festivals and celebrations”.

The ideas discussed in this blog and inevitably the language used will unavoidably favour the exam board I’m currently preparing my students for.  Nevertheless the ideas themselves should be applicable to any exam board and adaptable to languages other than Spanish.

It is worth considering how a module like this one might be examined.  It could be tested by all four skills

  • Speaking: any of the three elements could include something related to this topic.  Your sample assessment materials should give you an idea.
  • Writing: write about a festival/celebration you went to or would like to go to
  • Listening: listen to an account of Carnival and answer questions (AQA SAMS)
  • Reading: same as above but text on page

Here are some activities I have tried over the course of teaching this module.

The VLOG

This was an idea from a colleague of mine and one of the best MFL teachers I know.  The ultimate aim is that students produce a VLOG (video-blog) in which they describe a Spanish festival.  A growing number of the students I teach want to be “Youtubers” so they welcomed this idea.  Students were told they can appear in the VLOG if they choose or they could do something similar to Tio Spanish.  The main rule was that it was them doing the talking.  The structures I wanted the students to be using included the following:

it celebrates, it takes place in, it is, there is/are, you can see, you can, it starts, it finishes, it lasts, it is one of the most … , it has, it involves, it includes, I would like to go, because it looks, i would recommend it because it is.

Part 1: 2-3 lessons of controlled listening, reading, speaking and writing practice ensued trying to recycle these structures as much as possible.  I had been reading quite a bit over half-term and wanted to try out some new ideas.  One source of ideas was The Language Teacher ToolkitThe Language Teacher Toolkit.  Another was the Language Gym Blog.   A number of these formed part of the lesson and I wrote a number of texts that recycled the target structures above.

Part 2: I took the students to the ICT room.  They researched key details about a festival from a selection I had produced.  No-one did La Tomatina because that was on the scheme of work for subsequent weeks.  After that students produced a script using as many of the target structures as possible.

Part 3: They handed in their scripts, which I marked.  They then corrected and improved it based on feedback they were given so that their VLOG recording is grammatically sound.  As part of this, they also had to underline any words that they felt were tricky to pronounce.   Those that finished this redrafting process worked with me on how to pronounce the words.  Others were directed to Voki.  Whilst not perfect, it will do the job.

Part 4: Students are currently recording their vlogs.

 

Festivals that match interests.

Sometimes it is worth investigating a little more to find out some more festivals out there.  UK textbooks tend to emphasise la tomatina or navidad.  I think the former because it captures the imagination and the later because students can relate to it.  One student was quite motivated by the fería de caballos in Jerez.  Another really enjoyed looking into la mistura peruana (Peru’s food festival).  Día de amistad (South America) was perceived to be a great idea by another student and they wondered why we don’t have it here.

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Android Game

This was a way of practising the key vocabulary around festivals.  Here’s how it works:  Frodo draws 9 dots on a whiteboard in a 3×3 pattern.  Frodo then joins up 4-5 of the dots consecutively like an Android phone password.

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On the screen have 9 squares with phrases in.  These correspond to the 9 dots.

Sam’s job is to crack Frodo’s password.  Sam says the phrases on the screen trying to guess where Frodo’s password starts.  Frodo can only respond “si” when Sam has guessed the first one.  Even if he has said other parts of the pattern up to this point, he must get the first one.

The main aim here is repetition of vocabulary and familiarisation with the target structures.  You should advise students beforehand not to use their actual phone password.  You would think it might not need saying, but it does.

Trapdoor with lives

Trapdoor seems to be a staple of MFL teacher PowerPoints on TES.

trapdoor

Danielle was kind enough to let me use this example of trapdoor. You should visit her site: Morganmfl

The prevailing methodology seems to be that students restart when they get it wrong and go back to the beginning.  A slight twist I have tried recently is giving students a number of lives.  They then have to reach the end alive.  This means that they have a greater chance to use all of the vocabulary on the activity.  I tend to base the number of lives on 1-2 guesses per section.

For festivals I used the idea of a past tense account of the festival including the following vocabulary:

I went to, we went to, my friends and I went to, we participated in, we threw, a lot of, we ate, we drank, it was, we are going to go again, because it is, we are never going to go again,

Mastermind with lives

Image result for mastermind board gameAgain using the same principal as the trapdoor activity above.  Students have to guess what their partner is thinking.  They can only tell their partner how many they get right.  Place a table on the board with 3-4 columns.  The original game to the left uses four.  Personally, I prefer three for MFL lessons.  One student writes the target phrases in their book.  The other tries to guess the phrases that they have written.  This can be made quicker by giving students a number of lives.  It also means both students are likely to get a go.  Students seem to enjoy this one.

TL Questions and TL answers

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By Carlesboveserral [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)%5D, from Wikimedia Commons

This module has been great for training students to respond to target language questions with target language answers.  Using the AQA book, we covered la tomatina.  I wrote text about la tomatina from the point of view of “Marcos” who attended la tomatina.  There were then 8 TL questions with relatively simple answers in the text.  Part of the activity was to train pupils to look for language that is similar to the verbs in the question.

If this is the answer, what is the question

In the subsequent lesson, I jumbled up the TL questions and TL answers and asked students to match them.  The answers were on the left of the slide and questions on the right.  To increase the level of challenge in this activity, you could have students create the questions themselves.

Four Phrases One festival

Have four boxes of text on the screen.  Three of the boxes all partly describe a festival.  The final box should have some details that do not correlate with the others.  Students need to work out the festival as well as which box does not help them.  The idea behind this was to give them practice of filtering out the distractors when looking at higher level reading texts.  Depending on the level of your class you can make this as subtle as you feel is right.

Dice

I’m not quite sure where I would be without a set of 6 sided and 12 sided dice in lessons.  Aside from the rather popular “one pen one die” activity, you can do a variety of things.

Improvisation – students make a sentence based on prompt.  You could add a minimum word count to stretch them.

  1. Where was the festival?
  2. What was it about?
  3. What did you see?
  4. How was it?
  5. Who did you go with?
  6. What did you like most?

Roll, say, translate – Hugh rolls the dice and says the sentence.  Zac translates into English.

  1. se celebra en abril
  2. tiene lugar en Sevilla
  3. hay muchas casetas
  4. empieza dos semanas después de la Semana Santa
  5. la gente baila sevillanas, bebe manzanilla y come tapas
  6. Quiero visitarla porque parece bonita

etc

Extreme Snakes and Ladders

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By Druyts.t [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, from Wikimedia Commons

I’ll be honest with you; it is not extreme but the name seems to have an effect on classes.  Find a snakes and ladders board.  Set sentence-making challenges for anyone who lands on a number ending in 1,3,5,7,9.  You could also add a snake stopper and ladder allower.  These should be tricky tasks.

1  Where was the festival?

3  What was it about?

5  What did you see?

7  How was it?

9  Who did you go with?

Snake Stopper: make three sentences about a festival that includes the words … , … and …

Ladder Allower: Describe a festival you wouldn’t go to and why

If you have managed to read this far then well done!  Feel free to tweet any ideas to @everydaymfl or leave a comment below.

 

 

 

Some gems from ISMLA

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View image on Twitter

I was recently invited to lead a seminar titled “Blogging for Languages” at the ISMLA conference in Cambridge.  I had a great time, met some great professionals and learnt a lot over the course of the day.  The following are some gems that I picked up from Jocelyn Wyburd, Wendy Ayres-Bennett and Jess Lund from the Michaela School

Jocelyn Wyburd (@jwyburd) 

Jocelyn was the first speaker at the conference.  She is the Director of Languages Centre at the University of Cambridge.  She spoke about how the landscape in the United Kingdom currently looks for languages and language learning.  There are some points from her talk that are particularly relevant and encouraging for us as MFL teachers.

Jocelyn mentioned referred to an article in the Washington Post, shared on the Transparent Language Blog that stated most important qualities required to work at Google were being a “good coach, listening, empathy, problem solver, communicating well, insights into others and critical thinker.”  STEM came last on this list.  Jocelyn’s view was that a language develops all of those qualities that Google look for.

The British Academy wrote in 2017 that half of global leaders have a arts/hums/social science degree, along with 58% of FTSE 100 CEOs and 62% of UK election candidates.  This goes against what might be expected given the current push for STEM subjects.  Jocelyn then referred to research into languages that the UK needs post-Brexit.  A summary of that research can be found here courtesy of the British Council.   There is also a report on Languages for the Future which was cited in Jocelyn’s talk.

Jocelyn’s spoke strongly about how the UK needs more MFL to remain globally competitive, how the CBI (confederation of British industry sees languages as a “valuable asset to businesses” and how the Financial Times when reviewing the book Languages after Brexit spoke of a need for greater “cultural agility”.  Again this cultural agility is something MFL teachers are developing in our lessons, departments, displays and trips.

Lastly, she mentioned 300 different languages are spoken in London.  I would imagine this situation is slightly reduced but similar in other large cities.  The MET benefit greatly from police officers with language skills.  She also highlighted the MOD, GCHQ and armed forces as recruiters who see the value of languages.

I have always been of the view that languages are important and develop a variety of skills.  Jocelyn’s talk has reminded me of how much unseen development occurs in our students, the value of languages to employers and given me some really up-to-date stats, facts and information to share with my year 9s.

Wendy  Ayres-Bennett – Multilingualism: Empowering Individuals, Transforming Societies

Wendy spoke about the MEITs programme (Multilingualism: Empowering Individuals, Transforming Societies).  Here are some nuggets of information taken from her seminar:

1 in 5 UK school children have a language other than English as their home language.

90% of UK primaries do French but transition is variable and often poor in state sector.

Cognitive Benefits of learning a language were demonstrated in a study in Canada.  The study involved 230 dementia patients.  50% were bilingual.  The bilinguals developed dementia 4 years later.  This study was then replicated in India in 2016.  Another study showed that bilinguals recovered twice as well from strokes.  Greater detail can be found in Wendy’s blog here.

Jess Lund – The Michaela Way

The Michaela School has divided opinion.  The Guardian called it Britain’s Strictest School”, Tom Bennett writes “I left, as I have before, impressed. The kids are happy, and totally loyal to the school. Parents for the most part love it.”  From what I have seen, they have a strong belief in their approach and a desire for their students to be the very best they can be.

Jess’ presentation was delivered at the kind of pace that makes speed cameras flash.  It was informative, humourous and engaging.  What came across was her love of language teaching, her passion for her pupils and her belief in the Michaela Way.

The biggest take-away for me personally was the acronym: “PROFS” (past, reasons, opinions, future, subjunctive).  How had I not come across this before?!  I introduced my year 9s to it on the Monday after the conference and they are getting the idea that PROFS = better work and higher marks.

Other ideas I took were:

  • Dotting silent letters in French to improve security with pronunciation.  Unfortunately, my French class did tests in the lesson before half-term so I have not had an opportunity to try it out!
  • Constant phonics and over-pronunciation.  I do fairly regular lessons on phonics but perhaps something more systematic and targeted would help my students even more.
  • Teaching high frequency structures earlier on.  This is something I had been trying with my year 8s but not in quite the same way.  Jess’ sets of “awesome top 10s” definitely go further than I have.  They are something I am starting to look at.

Jess’ presentation made me question a few things about language teaching:

  • Should we be teaching high frequency structures in year 7 as student enthusiasm is higher?  Also teaching the language that makes the biggest impact earlier could lead to greater long-term retention.
  • They attempt to have “no wasted time” in their lessons.  This got me thinking, out of the 50 minutes I teach, how many might have been lost?

5 things to try tomorrow

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Image result for five

Here are 5 things that worked for me this week.

Voki.com

I had forgotten about this website until one of my pupils said “I know the words I just don’t know how to pronounce them when I’m practising at home”.  My internal, unvocalised reaction to this comment – a comment  innocently dropped after 4.5 years of Spanish – is probably best summarised by the picture below:

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In hindsight, my internal monologue should have focused on the positive “when practising at home”.  However, it was at this point that Voki came to mind.  Whilst not perfect, it does offer text to speech conversion.  It also can help occasionally with individual Spanish words.  Once you have set the voice to Spanish and the accent to a relatively clear one (our preference was for Javier).  Just remind the pupils they don’t need to sign up to use it, and also not to get distracted on creating avatars.

Imemorize 

For learning answers to questions, this is a particular favourite.  The address is as follows:

http://imemorize.org/download.html

It allows students to learn sentences and hide words to check their recall.  The activities are scaffolded quite well.  It would depend on the student who uses it as to how effective it is.

Students used to find this helpful in the days of controlled assessment.  One has also thanked me for “saving” their GCSE drama coursework.

No snakes, no ladders (Idea from Gianfranco Conti / Dylan Viñales)

Image result for snakes and ladders

Secondary MFL facebook groups such as: Secondary MFL Matters, Secondary MFL in Wales, New GCSE 9-1 resources, Global Innovative Language Teachers and others) have taken over my news-feed.  They allow some superb sharing of resources and ideas.  However, lots of activities appear briefly and then disappear: balloon towers, one pen&one dice.  This is one I want to keep.  It involves speaking, listening, reading and translation.  Students play in threes – 2 players and a referee. This is a refreshing change to the majority of MFL games, which seem to require a partner.  Full instructions for No Snakes, No Ladders can be found here.

Treasure Hunt

Treasure chest

This is a slight variation on the MFL standard of battleships.  Gives students a slightly larger grid (6×6) and tell them to hide some treasure somewhere in the grid.  This variation worked in 98% of the pairs in my class.  Sadly there was a kid who guessed it first time! 36 different squares!  What were the chances?!  I made sure that they had a rematch.

Quick Speaking Feedback

This next suggestion is a little bit embryonic.  It is something I have tried with two classes and am still considering how it might work best.

There is a huge focus in UK schools on feedback, DIRT and responding to marking.  The vast majority of DIRT I have seen on Facebook Groups and the TES relates purely to written work.  I’ve written about that here.

I started to consider how I may give short quick feedback on speaking, a skill I believe to be substantially more important than writing.  With two year 8 classes, I went around asking them to read a longer paragraph from a textbook page (Mira 2 or Listos 2).  Whilst they were reading out loud, I scribbled one quick sentence in their book regarding their pronunciation.  Some of the notes looked like this:

Speaking Feedback

  • Check “ci/ce” in middle of words – should sound like “th”  eg: “vacaciones”, “francia”
  • Remember ll = y
  • Superb today, nothing to correct!
  • Remember silent h when starting a word, otherwise fine.

To save time and workload, I wrote one sentence per student.  It did not take long to go through the class.

For those of you wanting students to respond to it then there were two ways I tried to engender this.  Firstly, I modelled the sentence and then they repeated it back to me.  This helped some to understand how it should sound.  Secondly, I wrote a list of 4-5 words in their book that I wanted them to say containing the same sound.  Lastly, in light of everything I had heard, I planned a lesson around J and G in Spanish.  This youtube clip was helpful in that lesson.  It took the focus off of me and gave them plenty of examples.  In that lesson I read out a list of words and students corrected me if I made a mistake.  We had races of words involving Js and Gs along with trying a few tongue twisters corporately and individually.

What I noticed from this was that some students got a substantial confidence boost.  Their ability to pronounce words was better than they perceived it to be.  Others appreciated the quick feedback.  Some appreciated being able to respond to the feedback without a lengthy redraft of a piece of work.  They also appreciated the lesson working on the J and G.

I’m still mulling over where to take this and what to do to refine the process but it was well received by the students and did appear to have a positive effect.

 

 

GCSE: Global Issues & Environment

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Image result for environment

This was an ambitious one.  Trying to make the topics of environment and global issues interesting was not the easiest task I have ever set myself.  I’m admit that I am not entirely sure if I have succeeded on this one.  Hopefully there is something for every reader.  Maybe it is an activity, or an idea below reminds you of a great resource or activity you have not used for a while.

Before I start, the reader should be aware of the following:

  • AQA refers to “global issues” and refers to “the environment”, “poverty/homelessness”
  • Edexcel/Pearson refers to “international and global dimension” with subheadings of “environmental issues, being green, access to natural resources”
  • WJEC simply refers to “global sustainability”.

I have done my best to put ideas that can be applied to all boards.  There will be a lean towards one in terms of the language used as that is what I am currently teaching.  There is certainly no intent to promote one above the other.

This post will look at a mix of the environment and global issues.  Poverty was covered here as I thought it went well with charity and volunteering.

What can I do with these themes?

Environment is a great opportunity to recycle or introduce previously learnt language.  In the past I have taught “you must” and similar phrases.  It has been used to revise the future (“will” or “going to”).  I have also used it as a means of teaching the conditional (“i could…”).  Lastly, it was a good means of introducing students to the subjunctive with impersonal statements such as “es necesario que”.  They were then introduced to the subjunctive properly with the global issues.  Global issues also became a good way to revise comparatives and superlatives.

Will my students be interested?

I think this is all about the “buy-in” from students.  Some will have an interest in the environment and being environmentally friendly.  They will go along with you on this topic.  I can picture that with other groups, and you know the ones I mean, it might be a tough ask.  I think in this case, any “buy-in” comes from the possibility that this topic could confront them on a roleplay card or photocard and they need to be ready for it.  Some may not engage at all.   I found the global issues topic engaged a mixed ability group, particularly the debate mentioned below.

Match up L2 & L2

Having seen this on a past paper example, I have started to use it more with my GCSE students.  There is a reasonably detailed reading text about a topic.  Opposite the text are 4 text messages from supposed young people that relate to points made in the text.

This infographic from día mundial del medio ambiente would serve just such a purpose.  students would have to write a number based on the alleged text messages sent by 4 supposed teenagers.

I have put links to two French ones below and two German ones as examples, you may be able to find better ones.

French infographic 1

French Infographic 2

German Infographic 1

German Infographic 2

These are simple ways to include some literary texts in your lessons without having to produce too much.  There are other ways to include literary texts in your lessons but that is another blogpost.

You can also create your own infographics if you were looking for a different reading text for recycling vocabulary.  Easel.ly  and Infogram were two I came across on a brief search.  If you know of a great one, put it in the comments section and claim the title of “First Commenter of 2018”.

Fake Whatsapp

I discovered this whatsapp generator.  The disadvantage in using it is that it does mean a bit of work in terms of resource preparation.  However, it will stop the normal glazing over that occurs when students see the textbook displaying a Nokia 3210 with buttons and a green screen (also known as the good old days).  The advantage is that you can produce the language and recycle plenty of vocabulary that you have covered in class.

How does this relate to global issues?  Very simple.  Create a fake group-chat using fakeWhatsapp.  Person 1 in the chat suggests they have a project where they have to ask people what they do to help the environment.  Persons 2,3,4,5 simply answer with what they do.  You could set some comprehension questions.  You could read out some statements that they then match to the people in the conversation.  Students could produce their own groupchat mimicking your one.  Plenty of options here.

How environmentally-friendly are you?

Some textbooks will have these.  However, if you are good with the language then translating this one will not take long.  You can probably find others on the TES website.  Quizzes are a great way to recycle and repeat language, along with revising time adverbs. Partners take turns reading the question and answering them.  If answers are linked to points then students could grade how environmentally friendly they are.

Do you turn out the lights on leaving the house?

  • A. I always turn out the lights on leaving the house
  • B. I often turn out the lights on leaving the house
  • C. I sometimes turn out the lights on leaving the house
  • D. Never.  I’m scared of the dark

The advantage of preparing your own is the recycling of previously learnt language.

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9 Lives

Using the quiz above.  Students pre-select an answer for each question.  Their partner then has to get from the start of the quiz to the end of the quiz.  Each time they are wrong, they lose a life.

Person 1 pre-selects answers

Person 1 reads question “Do you turn out the lights on leaving the house?”

Person 2 tries to guess pre-selected answer. “I always turn out the lights on leaving the house”

Person 1: “non/nein/no”

Person 2: now down to 8 lives, tries to guess pre-selected answer  “I sometimes turn out the lights on leaving the house”

Person 1: “oui/ja/si” reads next question “How often do you have a shower?”

and so it goes on…

 

povAntarctica, Ice, Caps, Mountains, Penguin, Ice Bergs

7 pictures 7 sentences

This was adapted from a commercially produced textbook.  It involved 7 sentences, each was divided in two.  There was also a picture.  The first task was to match the sentence halves and then match the sentences to the pictures underneath.  It would not take much to create your own version of this.

Moving on from the activity above, you could use these as a start of a photo-card discussion.  You could also simply get the pupils to generate sentences relating to the picture.

 

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Recycling container seen in San Sebastian.

Containers Card Sort

Again an adaptation of a commercially produced textbook (the same one in fact).  It was a great way to acquire and use a variety of vocabulary in a meaningful context.  Give students a series of headings in books (such as recycling containers) and a set of vocabulary (that can go in the containers).  You could adapt this to different levels

Easy: put vocabulary in correct container

Medium: Scaffolded sentences explaining where you would put each item

Hard: Use of conditional + direct object.  I would put it in … because

 

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Debate in progress             Photo Credit: Conselho Nacional de Justiça – CNJ Flickr via Compfight cc

Superlative/Comparative Debate

This was an activity that happened after a few lessons, in which we had covered opinion phrases, superlatives, subjunctive and global issues vocabulary.

A few years ago, there were a number of teachers talking about “Grouptalk”.  One of the ideas I saw was the idea of a cyclical discussion.  Students would start a discussion on a table of four and try to keep it going as long as possible.  I tried this last year with a mixed ability year 10 group on the “biggest problem facing the world”.  The conversation was heavily scaffolded with vocabulary help and some prompts on paper.  I have rendered the potential conversation below in English.  Names have been altered.

Ross: “In my opinion, the biggest problem in the world is poverty  What do you think Phoebe?”

Phoebe: “For me, the biggest problem in the world is terrorism.  Joey, in your opinion, between racism and terrorism, which is worse?”

Joey: “I believe that world leaders are the biggest problem.”

Rachel (interrupting) : “Joey you’re completely wrong, it’s global warming.”

Joey: “I disagree.  Ross, what do you think: global warming or terrorism?”

Students were genuinely surprised that they could take part in a relatively tricky debate entirely in the TL.

Debate Round 2: Bingo cards

Were I to do the debate above again, I would give 5×5 grid bingo cards with phrases to use.  Students that complete a line or a row would receive some form of reward.  Something like this could work…

Questions Subjunctives Opinion phrases Fancy Language
I asked someone an opinion me da miedo que exista Desde mi punto de vista aunque quisiera pensar de otra manera
I asked a question with two options es increíble que haya Opino que el problema que nos enfrenta es
Finished statement with a question no creo que sea A mi modo de ver y por si eso fuera poco

If you do not trust the student who is claiming the reward then you have two options:

  1. Students have to tell you one or two of the ways they used the phrases above
  2. Their partner completes it while they talk

Image result for tarsia

Original Tarsia

Environment Tarsia

Formerly an italian Renaissance design motif, now an educational activity.  The idea of Tarsia puzzles was hotly debated on the GILT Facebook Group a while back.  Some were heavily in favour; others were heavily against.  Arguments for included testing of vocabulary.  Arguments against suggested it was testing of being able to put shapes together.  Both points of view have been put forward by experienced colleagues.  Rather than a simple English-German matchup, I have tried to make them more challenging by doing the following:

  1. Populate it with a mix of seen and unseen vocabulary.
  2. Have the words around the outside edge as well – Maths do this with formulas to great effect.  Students could translate the outside edge vocabulary as an extension task.
  3. Have the tarsia composed entirely of synonyms in TL.
  4. Have the tarsia composed of starts and ends of sentences.
  5. Have the tarsia composed of a mixture of haben/sein verbs in perfect tense or etre/avoir verbs in passé composé.

Tarsia are puzzles I was introduced to by our maths department.  They were used to match up formulas that would give the same result but there are many ways to adapt them for MFL.  A google image search of the word will show you how they look.  How can you make one?  Download the program here.  They are quite heavy on the photocopying and chopping up so you may need your tutor group to do the chopping for you.

 

Plenty to come from EverydayMFL

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Dear all.

It’s the summer holidays so I’m taking a few weeks off.  From September there will hopefully be more regular posts as things got a little sporadic towards the end of last term.

In the meantime you can have a read of the following:

Top post:  Outstanding MFL Everyday

Second most popular post: GCSE Revision

Third most popular post: Feedback and marking.

Least popular posts: 5 Things to try tomorrow and 5 ideas to try this week

One for the NQTs: First Lesson of the year

Posts to come in the new academic year:

  • Making marking work
  • Teaching the new GCSE – reflections at the halfway point.
  • What is going to be different this year (lessons learnt from The Language Gym)

I’m sure there will be others but those are the three I’m working on.

Have a great summer!

 

5 Things to try tomorrow

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Number, Five, 5, Digit

It has been a while since writing one of these (or anything) so here are 5 things to try tomorrow.

Everydaymfl has been a little bit quiet of late but posts in the works include one on questioning and possibly one on the new GCSE – what I learnt teaching it so far.

No writing lessons

Writing is one of the easiest skills to show progress with.

  1. Student writes something
  2. Teacher corrects
  3. Student improves

However, students are used to a lot of this.  It really is quite something for them to have a “no writing” lesson in a subject they will typically associate with writing.  An entire lesson of speaking and listening is not a bad thing as it reminds them how important the skills are.   Some groups will be noticeably more enthused by this idea.  It is quite heavy on the planning and paired activity so you may want a settling activity at some point – perhaps hands up listening.

Group Model Essay

After my year 10 group seemed somewhat intimidated by the 150 word task in the new GCSE, I thought I would approach it gradually.  Here is what we did:

They were given a 150 word task from the AQA textbook.

In groups of 4 they drafted the best response on mini-whiteboards that they could come up with.  After some feedback from me, they improved the draft on mini-whiteboards.  One member of the group put it on to paper.  They handed them in and I typed them up on a word document with significant amounts of space around them.  I annotated the work highlighting tenses, good bits of grammar (comparatives, superlatives, subjunctives) and double ticks for anything that particularly stood out.

This was really well received and sometimes it is helpful to know “what a good one looks like” but also to know that you were involved in producing it.

Micro-listening enhancers

I have read a lot about these on Gianfranco Conti’s website.  I have found myself using them quite a bit recently as my speakers are kaputt.  The pupils did seem to be gaining confidence from them.  In teaching the perfect tense in Spanish, it seemed to have a positive effect on the pronunciation of “he” and “ha” et al later in the lesson.  Well worth a try and something I am looking to do a bit more of earlier on.

Photo Credit: immaculate-photons Flickr via Compfight cc

Photo Credit: immaculate-photons Flickr via Compfight cc

MM Paired Speaking

Possibly one of my favourite activities.  The MM refers to a lady I worked with on my PGCE.  In my mind the activity is named after her for two reasons.  1) I have never seen anyone else do it.  2) I’ve no idea what to call it!

Students divide their page into 3 columns.  If they don’t have a ruler then gentle folds work well.

  • Column 1: days of the week or time phrases in a list going down.  3 lines between each approximately
  • Column 2: draw simple picture representing an activity
  • Column 3: leave blank.
  1. Person A asks question for example: “Qué hiciste el lunes”
  2. Person B responds using time phrase and makes sentence based on picture “el lunes fui de compras”.
  3. Person A notes down in the empty column what their partner did on Monday.

You can add challenge by getting Person A to write in the third person on step 3.  You could differentiate for weaker learners by getting them to write a quick note as to what they heard.

This is a very versatile activity as it can be adapted to different tenses and languages easily.  It is good speaking and listening practice at the same time.  Both students should have that last column filled by the end of the activity.

The Future Tense Three Musketeers 

This came from a teacher I used to work with.  She would teach the future tense telling students that there are three musketeers.

Musketeer number 1 has 6 moves in Spanish.  Musketeer number 2 always does the same thing. Musketeer has different disguises but you can always tell it is him by looking at the ending.  The three can never be separated.  Once the concept has been introduced you may then move on to some mini-whiteboard practice.  Telling students to check musketeer number 1,2 or 3 seems to be quite effective.  It also seems to eradicate “voy a juego” or “voy a hago”

1                       2                                            3

Voy                  a                   ______________AR/ER/IR

Vas

Va

Vamos

Vais

Van

 

5 Things to try tomorrow

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Here are 5 things I have tried this week…

Los Meses Del Año en estilo Macarena.  

The kids loved this!  The trick is getting them to practise the lyrics before doing it with the actions.

 

Equipment check in TL

This idea was borrowed from an excellent seminar by Eva Lamb earlier this year.  When teaching students the items in the pencil case then get them to do an equipment check and stitch up their friend.

Persona 1: ¿Tienes un lápiz?

Persona 2: Si, tengo un lápiz.

Persona 1: ¿Tienes una calculadora?

Persona 2: no tengo una calculadora

Persona 1: ¡Señor, mi compañero no tiene calculadora!

12 sided dice revision

Teach a topic, such as family.  Then at the end of the topic go through with the students how the new speaking exams will take shape.  There is a general conversation section.  Get a set of 12 sided dice and set a GCSE group 12 questions of which they must ask their partner at least 7.  I found this was a great way of practising, ensuring spontaneity and helping them to learn to deal with unpredictability.  The students then peer assessed their partner using the following guidelines:

  1. Start low, ask yourself: did they do that?  If yes, move up.
  2. When you have reached the highest level.  Ask yourself: how well did they do?
  3. Pick a mark higher or lower depending on answer to Q2

12 sided dice were a great little investment and did not break the bank.

3 Minute KS3 Marking

 

Photo Credit: Leo Reynolds Flickr via Compfight cc

Photo Credit: Leo Reynolds Flickr via Compfight cc

This is a variation on a strategy suggested by Ross Morrison McGill (known to Twitter people as @TeacherToolkit).  Normally the suggestions from Teacher Toolkit take 5 minutes; this one takes two!!    I cannot find the original link but I believe he suggested only 2 minutes per book.  I have been trying it this week with some success and no perceptible dip in quality.  If you can manage 2 minutes then even better.  Here’s the Math…

2mins x class of 34 = 68mins

3mins x class of 34 = 102mins

Now if you’re like me a class of 34 is a massive amount all at once but the principle really helps.  You can still highlight errors, write a positive comment and set 2-3 targets in this time.

My Favourite Spanish Alphabet Song

I have used this as a way of recapping the phonics we did in the first lesson (see Rachel Hawkes for Powerpoints on this).  The lesson consists of introducing the alphabet sounds and getting a handle on those.  Then I use it as a vehicle to remind the students of the sound and spelling links.  We then look at a verse from a song (without telling them what it is) going through how each word should be said.  If they know the rules, they can do most of the words, before concerning themselves with what song it is.  We use the first verse of this one below…

 

Keeping Year 9 going…

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New_Chums_beach_Whangapoua_Waikato.jpg

It’s that time of year again.  Year 11 have gone.  Year 10 are thinking about work experience. Year 9s become that little bit more difficult to teach.

I got lucky this year.  I got a rather nice year 9 group.  They are a group with a mixture of middle and top set characters with a handful of lower ones thrown in.  The words mixed ability make the range of abilities sound wider than it is.

Over the past 5 years I have not been so lucky.  This post is an exploration of the variety of strategies I’ve tried.  The following picture does not represent a strategy but is definitely reflective of how it has felt at times:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

9×4 teaching aid.

Prepare a presentation/poster

Sometimes we do not get enough time to cover the extensive culture and history that surround the languages we teach.  Students prepare a presentation in groups of two or three to be delivered to their class.

How to vary it:

  • Give students a choice of delivery styles: interview, powerpoint and speech, podcast recorded using apps like spreaker , giant A2/A3 poster for corridor complete with text and pictures.  If you are a school with ipads then a whole world of possibilities are probably open to you (leave suggestions in the comments section).
  • To use TL or not to use TL.  With groups where most carry on til GCSE then insist on some TL, otherwise make the activity about presentation skills (perhaps colloaborate with English).
  • Horrible Histories.  Having met Terry Deary, the man is on to something.  The more gory or wacky it is; the more kids  will read about it.  Perhaps get your kids to go after the lesser known facts.
  • Ban certain websites.  Wikipedia is not always correct.  At university when I looked up the Spanish Civil War it turned out it was Manchester United’s sub goalkeeper!  Encourage use of reputable sources.
History Culture Geography
Guerra de independencia Don Quixote Espana
Islamic Conquest of Spain Gabriel Garcia Marquez Bolivia
The Inquistion Cataluna Peru
Colombus Castilla y Leon Paraguay
Spanish Civil War El País Vasco Chile
Franco Flamenco Ecuador
Juan Carlos de Borbon Tango Honduras
Zapatero Bullfighting Costa Rica
Ernesto Che Guevara Galicia Puerto Rico
Simon Bolivar Bunuel Venezuela
Al Andalus La tomatina Colombia
Eva Peron San Fermin Los Andes
Evo Morales Pedro Almodovar El salar de uyuni
Diego Maradona Las islas canarias Patagonia

Spanish survival kit

Everything needed for the casual tourist.  What does a holidaying student need?

WEEK THEME
1 Introductions

Name ¿Cómo te llamas? Me llamo …,

How are you + opinions¿Qué tal? ¿ Cómo estás?

Numbers 1 – 20, Age ¿Cuántos años tienes?

Alphabet,
2 Personal information

Where live ¿Dónde vives? Vivo en …

Holiday dates, times
3 Food and drink

Basic vocabulary

Ordering in a restaurant/bar/café

Complaining – this is not what I ordered etc
Money and shopping

Currency

Asking how much

Understanding larger numbers and prices

I would like Quisiera …

I like/don’t like Me gusta…/ No me gusta …
5 Directions

Asking where places are in a town ¿Dónde está …? Esta … ¿Hay … par aquí?

Understanding directions
6 Revision

There are obvious benefits to this approach.  It gives students some revision of the basics and prepares them for holidays.  The downside is that it is too simplistic for some.

Start GCSE

This is this year’s idea.  As a department we looked at the new specs and decided there was some stuff we have never taught.  So we decided to give it a go.  The results have been surprising.  Most students seem to have taken to it as they appreciate it is necessary for their classmates.  Other groups with slightly lower numbers of GCSE students have found it a bit tougher.  They do however appreciate the more advanced themes (global understanding) and focus on being able to make up stuff on the spot.  Rachel Hawkes writes that students judge their TL abilities based on what they can say and she is right.

A Film

“But SLT would never allow it!!” I hear you scream.  You may be right but at the same time there is a lot to be gained, if it is handled well.

Things to consider:

  • Get permission from parents, HoD and SLT if needed.
  • Make sure it is already on your scheme of work!  History show films regularly, why not mfl?
  • Create a worksheet with questions to provoke thought.
  • Give pupils a selection of words to find and switch the subtitles on.
  • Give pupils a synopsis to translate sections of before starting.
  • Give the pupils some character bios to translate before starting.
  • Give the pupils some character bios to fill in during the film with multiple choice options.  Eg: Ramón es descapacitado / paralisado / activo
  • You could show them the trailer to give an overall picture.
  • You could give them a series of pictures from the film to put in order afterwards .(perhaps with a short Spanish explanation underneath.
  • You could write some true/false sentences for the students to work out.
  • You could make a multiple choice quiz based on the film using Kahoot to gauge their understanding of the film.

One of the most difficult GCSE groups I ever taught was spellbound watching el mar adentro.  17 boys, 2 girls and they were transfixed.  It also fed quite nicely into their Philosophy, Theology, Ethics lessons at the time.

Grammar Revision

If you have a group doing GCSE then take them on a grammar crashcourse.  I believe grammar teaching is important and it can be fun (post on quirky ways to teach grammar is coming soon).

Expo and Mira tend to cover something grammatical and then assume it is mastered at the end of that particular page.  The next time it is revisited, it will be similar but with something new added.  If you are following one of these schemes then you may find students are not quite as adept with the grammar as you would like.  Graham Nuthall (The Hidden Lives of Learners) suggests students need three exposures to new concepts before they start to embed them.  If you are using the above textbooks, it is entirely possible that students will only have had one exposure to some concepts.

The Euros, world cup, Olympics, Women’s World Cup, Wimbledon

Use it as an opportunity to teach opinions and the future tense in the third person.  You could also use it to revise past tense, weather and a variety of vocabulary.  More ideas on Wimbledon can be found here with this shameless self-promotion link.

I think that … is going to win

In my opinion England will win etc.

Perhaps you do something different entirely, leave it in the comments section below!

Outstanding MFL everyday.

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‘Hypothetical’ conversation overheard in staffroom:

Experienced teacher 1: “I delivered a number of outstanding lessons today”

Experienced teacher 2 “Ha! Your definition of an outstanding lesson is you putting your feet up while the kids are standing outside!”

Experienced teacher 1: “you saw them then!”

I’ve seen a lot of requests on TES forums, Twitter and Facebook for outstanding activities or an outstanding lesson on (insert topic here).  I’ve probably wished for a few myself in the past.  There’s nothing wrong with asking for something that works when you’re low on time and your desk is covered by paper and looks like a scale model of the himalayas. What makes an outstanding lesson is highly subjective and is based largely on the observations of the person watching.  I think even OFSTED realised this recently.  OFSTED say they will no longer grade individual lessons or learning walks.  This is good news, although they have to deliver a judgement on quality of teaching and learning across the school so some form of grading still has to take place (in their heads one assumes). Teaching and learning still has to be judged as outstanding/good/requires improvement/inadequate.

This is not a post on “how to play the OFSTED game” as the only OFSTED game to be played is simply high quality teaching and learning.  It is a post about the key ingredients for an outstanding lesson and how we might apply those in MFL teaching everyday.

Before we look at the ingredients.  Let’s hear it from the horses mouth:

Inspectors will use a considerable amount of first-hand evidence gained from observing pupils in lessons, talking to them about their work, scrutinising their work and assessing how well leaders are securing continual improvements in teaching. Direct observations in lessons will be supplemented by a range of other evidence to enable inspectors to evaluate the impact that teachers and support assistants have on pupils’ progress. Inspectors will not grade the quality of teaching, learning and assessment in individual lessons or learning walks.

Inspectors will consider:

  • how information at transition points between schools is used effectively so that teachers plan to meet pupils’ needs in all lessons from the outset – this is particularly important between the early years and Key Stage 1 and between Key Stages 2 and 3
  • whether work in all year groups, particularly in Key Stage 3, is demanding enough for all pupils
  • pupils’ views about the work they have undertaken, what they have learned from it and their experience of teaching and learning over time
  • information from discussions about teaching, learning and assessment with teachers, teaching assistants and other staff
  • parents’ views about the quality of teaching, whether they feel their children are challenged sufficiently and how quickly leaders tackle poor teaching
  • scrutiny of pupils’ work, with particular attention to:
  • pupils’ effort and success in completing their work, both in and outside lessons, so that they can progress and enjoy learning across the curriculum
  • how pupils’ knowledge, understanding and skills have developed and improved
  • the level of challenge and whether pupils have to grapple appropriately with content, not necessarily ‘getting it right’ first time, which could be evidence that the work is too easy
  • how well teachers’ feedback, written and oral, is used by pupils to improve their knowledge, understanding and skills. 

Source text here P44.

Outstanding (1)

  • Teachers demonstrate deep knowledge and understanding of the subjects they teach. They use questioning highly effectively and demonstrate understanding of the ways pupils think about subject content. They identify pupils’ common misconceptions and act to ensure they are corrected.
  • Teachers plan lessons very effectively, making maximum use of lesson time and coordinating lesson resources well. They manage pupils’ behaviour highly effectively with clear rules that are consistently enforced.
  • Teachers provide adequate time for practice to embed the pupils’ knowledge, understanding and skills securely. They introduce subject content progressively and constantly demand more of pupils. Teachers identify and support any pupil who is falling behind, and enable almost all to catch up.
  • Teachers check pupils’ understanding systematically and effectively in lessons, offering clearly directed and timely support.
  • Teachers provide pupils with incisive feedback, in line with the school’s assessment policy, about what pupils can do to improve their knowledge, understanding and skills. The pupils use this feedback effectively.
  • Teachers set challenging homework, in line with the school’s policy and as appropriate for the age and stage of pupils, that consolidates learning, deepens understanding and prepares pupils very well for work to come.
  • Teachers embed reading, writing and communication and, where appropriate, mathematics exceptionally well across the curriculum, equipping all pupils with the necessary skills to make progress. For younger children in particular, phonics teaching is highly effective in enabling them to tackle unfamiliar words.
  • Teachers are determined that pupils achieve well. They encourage pupils to try hard, recognise their efforts and ensure that pupils take pride in all aspects of their work. Teachers have consistently high expectations of all pupils’ attitudes to learning.
  • Pupils love the challenge of learning and are resilient to failure. They are curious, interested learners who seek out and use new information to develop, consolidate and deepen their knowledge, understanding and skills. They thrive in lessons and also regularly take up opportunities to learn through extra-curricular activities.
  • Pupils are eager to know how to improve their learning. They capitalise on opportunities to use feedback, written or oral, to improve.
  • Parents are provided with clear and timely information on how well their child is progressing and how well their child is doing in relation to the standards expected. Parents are given guidance about how to support their child to improve.
  • Teachers are quick to challenge stereotypes and the use of derogatory language in lessons and around the school. Resources and teaching strategies reflect and value the diversity of pupils’ experiences and provide pupils with a comprehensive understanding of people and communities beyond their immediate experience.

So let’s have a look at those key ingredients and what they mean for us in the classroom:

Key Ingredient: What it means for MFL teachers:
Transition information We need a knowledge of where the children are coming from.  We need some idea of how much language tuition the children have had, what language and how effectively it was taught.  This is more applicable to year 7.  As far as year 8s and 9s are concerned, you will need an idea of where they finished at the end of year 7.
Challenge Is your work demanding enough?  I don’t mean simply sticking an extension task on a starter or a reading activity.  Are you sufficiently challenging that little lass who finishes the task seconds after you have explained it?  Should she have finished that quickly?  Are your tasks differentiated enough to keep all students challenged and engaged?  Could you give different students a different task?  How could you reward risk-taking with the language?
Pupils views ARGH?!   What would they say about your lessons?
Parents views Informed by the above as few parents have likely seen your superb lesson on the future tense!
Scrutiny of work From this I understand the following:

1)      Pupils must be seen to be making an effort and doing well and this should be seen through their exercise books.

2)      There must be some evidence that their abilities have improved.  You can do this through various ways.  Some staff will use charts with “can do” statements or it could simply be that there are less corrections in the book later in the year.

3)      There must be some work that is not “too easy” for them where they struggle.  Struggle is part of learning so that is not a bad thing.  If it is all ticked and correct then it could be interpreted as too easy.

4)      Feedback should inform and foster improvements in knowledge, understanding and skills.  For more on feedback see here
Subject Knowledge Must be evident along with questioning.  Questioning varies depending on subjects.  I think certain subjects have it easier than MFL but students could deduce a grammar rule if given sufficient examples and then go on to some structured practice of that rule.  If you are thinking of ways to develop your subject knowledge then look no further:  Keeping your languages up!
Effective Planning No time wasted and all resources readily available and accessible.  They may not want to see a lesson plan per se but would expect to see a well planned MFL lesson.  This is probably the best thing I have read on planning an MFL lesson.
Behaviour Management Clear rules and consistently enforced.  I would argue that there is nothing wrong with removing a student whose behaviour is detrimental to the progress of the rest of the class, even in an observation.
Adequate practice time Pupils must be allowed enough time to practice and embed what they are learning.  There must then be a definite increase in demand and evident progression in difficulty of the material covered in the lesson.  Practice in MFL will obvious take place through different skills but it is worth considering: how do they link to your overall objectives in that lesson?
Checking understanding Understanding must be checked and any misconceptions identified.  You can probably tell who will struggle so maybe set the class a short activity that they can use to demonstrate their learning, while you go and help those who need it.
Challenging h/wk Homework could consolidate, extend or prepare the students for future work.  It should do all of these.  More on homework here
Literacy and Numeracy Whilst numeracy is harder to shoehorn into MFL, literacy is very much the bedrock of what we do.  Start using grammatical terms and do not shy away from them.  You’re a language teacher and probably a fan of the odd reflexive verb, subordinating conjunction or relative clause.
Pupils know how to improve Pupils have to know how they can make their French/Spanish/German better.  What does their book tell them and what does your classroom wall tell them?
Challenging stereotypes As MFL teachers we are in an ideal place to do this and hopefully avoid situations like the recent awful match of the day video where the presenters butcher the French language.  I’m not giving you a link, as a football fan I find it embarrassing.

OFSTED’s descriptions miss out one major feature of teaching that I believe is key to delivering outstanding lessons and that is relationships.  Admittedly you can produce an outstanding lesson that meets all of the above boxes but there is likely to be one question in the observer’s mind that also needs answering: “would I be happy for this person to teach my kids?”  Your relationships with your students will answer that.  John Tomsett says: ‘Fundamentally students need to feel loved and I really don’t care what anyone might think of that, to be honest, because if I know anything about teaching, I know that is true.’

What could I do now? 5 things to try this term.

If you’re English then make a cup of tea before contemplating the following:

  1. Build those relationships.  Grab your seating plans or markbook and find 3 students per class who you are going to develop your relationship with.  How are you going to do that?  Will you be teaching those kids next year?  Who knows?  Do it anyway.
  2. Key Ingredients.  Pick one of the key ingredients that you need to work on.  In your planning for next week incorporate it into every lesson.  Yep, that’s every single one.  It’s all very well reading a blog post but you have to act on it.  My Headteacher likes the phrase purposeful practice.  To paraphrase Aristotle, “we are what we repeatedly do.  Excellence therefore is a habit not an act.”
  3. Share.  Share the OFSTED descriptors or key ingredients above with your department.  What ones do you want to work on over the coming weeks?  What do you need to put into place for next year?
  4. Gained time.  Can you devote some of it to CPD?  Who in your department is good at challenge, differentiation, target language use?  Who could you learn from?
  5. Power of praise.  I used to do termly phone-calls home to a parent to give some positive feedback on a student.  I’ve slipped on this and may well do a few in the coming half-term.  Shaun Allison writes about them here.  You could also do an email although make sure you personalise it.  One simple phone-call has massive potential in terms of relationship with the pupil, their parents and the parents of other students.
  6. Consider September.  Yep, right now!  September is where we set the tone, set the patterns and culture in our departments, what would you like an observer to see if they entered your classroom?  What needs to be part of your practice?
  7. Iron sharpening iron.  “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another” (biblical proverb).  I love this proverb as it applies to most areas of life. Another person can always be guaranteed to sharpen you and smooth out the rough edges.  Most NQTs have a mentor and most PGCE trainees do too.  Once we exit that process, we are on our own.  Who could you work with to improve your own teaching?  Can you get them to pop in and watch?  No notes, no agenda, no judgments and no threat, but just someone there simply to develop your practice.

Further Reading

Indicators of Outstanding – a blog post by education adviser Mary Myatt.

Great Lessons – a series of blogs by Tom Sherrington (Headteacher) on what makes for great lessons.

An Outstanding Teacher – short blog post by Shaun Allison

Six Steps to Outstanding – I read this when I was starting as an NQT and found it useful.